What's the maximum length of an HTTP GET request?
Is there a response error defined that the server can/should return if it receives a GET request that exceeds this length?
This is in the context of a web service API, although it's interesting to see the browser limits as well.
The limit is dependent on both the server and the client used (and if applicable, also the proxy the server or the client is using).
Most servers and clients have a limit of 8192 bytes (8 KB), which is usually configurable somewhere in the server or client settings. The HTTP specification recommends 8000 octets in section 4.1:
It is RECOMMENDED that all senders and recipients support, at a minimum, URIs with lengths of 8000 octets in protocol elements. Note that this implies some structures and on-wire representations (for example, the request line in HTTP/1.1) will necessarily be larger in some cases.
But this is thus not required. The limit is generally lower in older clients. For example Internet Explorer had a limit of about 2 KB. The previous version of the HTTP specification even literally states the following:
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.
If the limit is exceeded in either the browser or the server, most will just truncate the characters outside the limit without any warning. Some servers however may send an HTTP 414 'URI Too Long' error.
If you need to send large data, then better use POST instead of GET. Its limit is much higher, but more dependent on the server used than the client. Usually up to around 4 GB is allowed by the average web server. This is also configurable somewhere in the server settings. The average server will display a server-specific error/exception when the POST limit is exceeded, usually as an HTTP 500 error.
You are asking two separate questions here:
What's the maximum length of an HTTP GET request?
As already mentioned, HTTP itself doesn't impose any hard-coded limit on request length; but browsers have limits ranging on the 2 KB - 8 KB (255 bytes if we count very old browsers).
Is there a response error defined that the server can/should return if it receives a GET request exceeds this length?
That's the one nobody has answered.
HTTP 1.1 defines status code 414 Request-URI Too Long for the cases where a server-defined limit is reached. You can see further details on RFC 2616.
For the case of client-defined limits, there isn't any sense on the server returning something, because the server won't receive the request at all.
Browser limits are:
Browser Address bar document.location
or anchor tag
---------------------------------------------------
Chrome 32779 >64k
Android 8192 >64k
Firefox >64k >64k
Safari >64k >64k
Internet Explorer 11 2047 5120
Edge 16 2047 10240
Want more? See this question on Stack Overflow.
Technically, I have seen HTTP GET will have issues if the URL length goes beyond 2000 characters. In that case, it's better to use HTTP POST or split the URL.
A similar question is here: Is there a limit to the length of a GET request?
I've hit the limit and on my shared hosting account, but the browser returned a blank page before it got to the server I think.
As already mentioned, HTTP itself doesn't impose any hard-coded limit on request length; but browsers have limits ranging on the 2048 character allowed in the GET method.
Yes. There isn't any limit on a GET request.
I am able to send ~4000 characters as part of the query string using both the Chrome browser and curl command.
I am using Tomcat 8.x server which has returned the expected 200 OK response.
Here is the screenshot of a Google Chrome HTTP request (hiding the endpoint I tried due to security reasons):
RESPONSE
