[Bioperl-l] NCBI GenBank web retrieval

[Chris Devers]

On Sat, 19 Jan 2002, Jason Stajich wrote:

> Are there limits to size of URLs ?  I thought there might be which could
> be a problem since the requests are sent as GETs not POSTs.  

>From what I understand, the allowed length is dependant on a lot of
things, including the server software, server OS, etc. A decent rule of
thumb might be to prefer POST for anything over 1000 characters or so, but
allow GET for anything shorter. Also they don't seem to be mutually
exclusive: I haven't found any sources indicating that it's a bad idea to
send a POST request that also happens to have GET data as part of the
query string. Breaking up the parameter data might or might not make any
sense, but a script using e.g. CGI.pm shouldn't care, I would think. 

Of course, Lincoln could probably address this better than I could :)



-- 
Chris Devers                           chdevers@netscape.net
Apache / mod_perl / http://homepage.mac.com/chdevers/resume/