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Using IE6+, what is the maximum amount of text you can POST with a <textarea> before something breaks?

Edit: The answer I'm hoping for is "there's no way you could actually type something meaningful and unmallicious into a textarea and crash Internet Explorer."

Greg
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Because of the way POST data is sent there's no low-end limit to the number of characters you can send. There is an upper bound, of course. How much data are you talking about here?

The answer is sneezing will cause IE to collapse, sneezing softly doubly so for IE6

jcolebrand
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  • I'm hoping they could enter in 20 to 30 thousand characters without problem. – Greg Jan 14 '11 at 20:44
  • http://lipsum.com and try it quickly to see what happens. Save the source string on the server and test it against what's received. I don't have IE6 or I would whip you up a page. – jcolebrand Jan 14 '11 at 20:45
  • I don't have it either. :/ (QA is trying to make me use javascript to limit the textarea so users don't crash their browser, which I think is silly) – Greg Jan 14 '11 at 20:45
  • see if IT can get you a VM with IE6 on an old copy of windows XP for testing – jcolebrand Jan 14 '11 at 20:49
  • lol, that was fast. I should think 30k of text on an upload would be fine. Let us know if you ever find an upper bound below 4GB mkay? – jcolebrand Jan 14 '11 at 20:54
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there's no way you could actually type something meaningful into a textarea and crash Internet Explorer..IE6+

Spooks
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  • You haven't used IE much have you? – jcolebrand Jan 14 '11 at 20:49
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    Haha, personally I use firefox or chrome. But I am forced to test in IE, and from everything that could and will break IE, I have not broken it by using POST with too many characters in a textarea. – Spooks Jan 14 '11 at 20:52
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Wouldn't it make more sense to have the users upload a file instead of copying and pasting 20 to 30 thousand characters into the textarea?

adam0101
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  • Yeah, if they are entering that many characters they are probably "doing it wrong", but I picked it as a worst case scenario. – Greg Jan 14 '11 at 20:53
  • think form submissions, like comments or the like. Yes, most of the time you won't have 30k characters, but you're thinking small fish. Think something like a forum. Or a blog engine. Those are still textareas. – jcolebrand Jan 14 '11 at 20:55