Max size of GET command in HTML

[Anon]

Does anyone know of a maximum size (in characters) for the GET tag in HTML?

Is this browser dependant or server dependant?

[brandonschnell]

< 256 would be a safe upper limit but its dependant on the browser and some will have buffer overflow issues with anything longer than 220 chars or so. haven't confirmed this tho.

might as well use POST if you're using more than a couple of variables.

[Anon]

Thanks Brandon.

Do you know of any references to this type of information?

[brandonschnell]

the html 2.0 specs don't mention an upper limit, but several how to pages warn about it.

http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/forms/methods.html

the html2.0 rfc:
http://rfc.fh-koeln.de/rfc/html/rfc1866.html

[Anon]

IE3 truncates URLs longer than 255 characters.

But the limit is also server-dependant; it's usually some KB. I found this in RFC 2616 (HTTP 1.1) :

"The HTTP protocol does not place any a priori limit on the length of
a URI. Servers MUST be able to handle the URI of any resource they serve, and SHOULD be able to handle URIs of unbounded length if they provide GET-based forms that could generate such URIs. A server SHOULD return 414 (Request-URI Too Long) status if a URI is longer than the server can handle.

Note: Servers ought to be cautious about depending on URI lengths above 255 bytes, because some older client or proxy implementations might not properly support these lengths."