what is maximum length of text box

jayanagi

hai all,

    What is the maximum character length of the html form text box?

thanks in advance..

greensweater

There is a limit in the size of the POST data which is around 8000 characters for the whole POST, including all variable names & values. AFAIK the only limit to the size of the text box itself is the available memory.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

laserlight

There is a limit in the size of the POST data which is around 8000 characters for the whole POST, including all variable names & values.

I have not heard of such a limit on POST data, though I have heard of a limit with GET, even though such a limit does not conform to RFC 2616.

greensweater

Oh that's right I was thinking GET data. I ran into this limit when developing some AJAX thing.

So the answer is, as long as you use POST, theoretically there is no limit... at some point though you will run into script timeouts, server timeouts, file size limits etc.

I just tested with 800k chars and it worked. It won't include newlines though. Try for yourself:

# filename: post.php
<html><body><form action='post.php' method='post'>
<input type='text' name='foo'/><input type='submit'/>
</form></body></html>
<?php
if (isset($_POST['foo'])) echo 'last post:<br/>'.nl2br(chunk_split($_POST['foo']));

Weedpacket

laserlight wrote:
even though such a limit does not conform to RFC 2616

This is spelt out in §3.2. That section also suggests "Servers ought to be cautious about depending on URI lengths above 255 bytes", but this is due to client limitations, and not a normative part of the protocol.

But you have to admit, sending 8000 bytes of data to the server using GET does violate the spirit of the protocol!

HTTP aside, and speaking of HTML alone, the maximum length of a text box field is whatever you specify as the value of the "maxlength" attribute.