What is the difference between POST and GET

Question

I ve only recently been getting involved with PHP AJAX jQuery and it seems to me that an important part of these technologies is that of POST and GET   First  what is the difference between POST and GET  Through experimenting  I know that GET appends the returning variables and their values to the URL string  website com directory index php name YourName amp bday YourBday   but POST doesn t   So  is this the only difference or are there specific rules or conventions for using one or the other   Second  I ve also seen POST and GET outside of PHP  also in AJAX and jQuery  How do POST and GET differ between these 3  Are they the same idea  same functionality  just utilized differently

User · Answer

Whilst not a description of the differences  below are a couple of things to think about when choosing the correct method    GET requests can get cached by the browser which can be a problem  or benefit  when using ajax  GET requests expose parameters to users  POST does as well but they are less visible   POST can pass much more information to the server and can be of almost any length

User · Answer

If you are working RESTfully  GET should be used for requests where you are only getting data  and POST should be used for requests where you are making something happen   Some examples    GET the page showing a particular SO question POST a comment Send a POST request by clicking the  Add to cart  button

User · Answer

With POST you can also do multipart mime encoding which means you can attach files as  well  Also if you are using post variables across navigation of pages  the user will get a warning asking if they want to resubmit the post parameter  Typically they look the same in an HTTP request  but you should just stick to POST if you need to  POST  something TO a server and  GET  if you need to GET something FROM a server as that s the way they were intended

User · Answer

POST and GET are two HTTP request methods  GET is usually intended to retrieve some data  and is expected to be idempotent  repeating the query does not have any side-effects  and can only send limited amounts of parameter data to the server  GET requests are often cached by default by some browsers if you are not careful   POST is intended for changing the server state  It carries more data  and repeating the query is allowed  and often expected  to have side-effects such as creating two messages instead of one

User · Answer

GET and POST are two different types of HTTP requests   According to Wikipedia      GET requests a representation of the specified resource  Note that GET should not be used for operations that cause side-effects  such as using it for taking actions in web applications  One reason for this is that GET may be used arbitrarily by robots or crawlers  which should not need to consider the side effects that a request should cause    and      POST submits data to be processed  e g   from an HTML form  to the identified resource  The data is included in the body of the request  This may result in the creation of a new resource or the updates of existing resources or both    So essentially GET is used to retrieve remote data  and POST is used to insert update remote data    HTTP 1 1 specification  RFC 2616  section 9 Method Definitions contains more information on GET and POST as well as the other HTTP methods  if you are interested   In addition to explaining the intended uses of each method  the spec also provides at least one practical reason for why GET should only be used to retrieve data      Authors of services which use the HTTP protocol SHOULD NOT use GET based forms for the submission of sensitive data  because this will cause this data to be encoded in the Request-URI  Many existing servers  proxies  and user agents will log the request URI in some place where it might be visible to third parties  Servers can use POST-based form submission instead    Finally  an important consideration when using GET for AJAX requests is that some browsers - IE in particular - will cache the results of a GET request  So if you  for example  poll using the same GET request you will always get back the same results  even if the data you are querying is being updated server-side  One way to alleviate this problem is to make the URL unique for each request by appending a timestamp

User · Answer

A POST  unlike a GET  typically has relevant information in the body of the request    A GET should not have a body  so aside from cookies  the only place to pass info is in the URL    Besides keeping the URL relatively cleaner  POST also lets you send much more information  as URLs are limited in length  for all practical purposes   and lets you send just about any type of data  file upload forms  for example  can t use GET -- they have to use POST plus a special content type encoding    Aside from that  a POST connotes that the request will change something  and shouldn t be redone willy-nilly   That s why you sometimes see your browser asking you if you want to resubmit form data when you hit the  back  button   GET  on the other hand  should be idempotent -- meaning you could do it a million times and the server will do the same thing  and show basically the same result  each and every time

User · Answer

The only  big  difference between POST  amp  GET  when using them with AJAX  is since GET is URL provided  they are limited in ther length  since URL arent infinite in length

[http] What is the difference between POST and GET?

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