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I'm trying to create an excessively large URL , one which is at least 60,000 characters. On an Apache web server I have access to, the maximum URL length I can produce is ~4000 characters or so. Any ideas on tools I can use to achieve this?

skaffman
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Unlucky_faust
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  • Or if anyone has any existing URLs that are this large that I can access that would be great. Thanks. – Unlucky_faust Feb 06 '12 at 12:56
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    Possible duplicate http://stackoverflow.com/questions/925485/is-there-any-way-to-overcome-the-2k-character-limitation-on-the-url-length – Jeow Li Huan Feb 06 '12 at 12:57
  • Why would you want to create a URL that long? – Jasper Feb 06 '12 at 12:57
  • Please see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/417142/what-is-the-maximum-length-of-a-url - more than 2000 characters in a URL is simply not supported by some of the software you are likely to want to work with. e.g. IE9... Take @atornblad 's advice. – perfectionist Feb 06 '12 at 13:15

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Don't do that. As you say, it's excessively large. If you feel you have the need for that type of url, you are not using the web architecture correctly. Most web servers won't allow you to parse those urls, and most web browsers won't handle them. If you write your own web server software, and your own web client, well... still no!

Tell us a bit more about the reasons why you need that type of url, and we can tell you what you should do instead.

Are you putting way to many search parameters in one GET request? Are you trying to upload a PDF through a query string? Are you base64-encoding a JPEG and uploading it?

You should probably look into POST requests, possibly web services, maybe Ajax... It all depends on what you are trying to do.

Anders Marzi Tornblad
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  • I'm trying to verify a fix for errors on our proxy server caused by users sending requests for large URLs. So any large URL will do. How some users have been sending URLs this large I have no idea. POST requests seem like the most plausible reason. I will look into that. Thanks. – Unlucky_faust Feb 06 '12 at 13:44
  • Look at the error logs and try some of the urls that caused problems. – Anders Marzi Tornblad Feb 06 '12 at 13:46
  • This has been done but the URLs causing errors are unavailable to me. I'll be experimenting with applications like Tamper Data, Modify Headers, and Fiddler to customize my own POST request. – Unlucky_faust Feb 06 '12 at 13:56
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Well, you can just type what URL you like, but you won't be able to use it anywhere.

Different browsers have different limitations. Some version of Internet Explorer had the limit 2083 characters. Most recent browsers allow more, but it's still only a few kilobytes.

Web servers naturally also have some limit on the URL length. This usually is only a few kilobytes also.

There is no limiation on the URL length in the HTML standard, because an URL usually corresponds to a resource in a file system on a server, and a physical path have a limitation like 256 characters (windows) or 4096 characters (linux), so any resonable URL would not be very long anyway.

Guffa
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