What would a body in an HTTP GET look like?

Question

I realize this is not recommended, but I'm wondering what the URL would look like, for example:

http://myserver.com/rest/info?param1=foo&param2=bar

how would you append a body to that URL, I don't think &body would work.

Reason I'm looking at this is I'm looking for a way around a rather limited preset access to CURL from within my chosen language, so I'm wondering if I can use GET somehow instead of POST.

EDIT: Several people marked this as a duplicate of another question, but the essence of my question was "What would the body look like" where the other question is and I quote here from the other post:

My questions:

Is this a good idea altogether? Will HTTP clients have issues with using request bodies within a GET request?

Therefore I don't believe this is a duplicate at all, I believe those who marked it as such perhaps didn't really read either question much beyond the title.

@CodeCaster: Just because something shouldn't be done, doesn't mean it isn't worth knowing how it *could be done*. Sometimes you just need to Macgyver something. — alphablender, Jun 13 '13 at 19:03
Yes, colleagues who come after you and third parties who have to communicate with this service will love your MacGyvering. If it's just a private project though: go ahead. — CodeCaster, Jun 13 '13 at 20:40

Michael Banzon · Accepted Answer · 2013-06-13T18:47:35.877

2

The URL wouldn't change by adding a body to the HTTP request. In addition to the normal HTTP headers your request would also include a body (separated from the header by a blank line).

I would strongly recommend that you DON'T do this with GET requests though - it is not well treated with HTTP servers and is somewhat wrong if you want to follow and respect the HTTP specification.

A simple request would look something like this:

GET /whatever HTTP/1.1
Host: foobar.com
User-Agent: Selfmade telnet
Connection: close

hello world

edited Jun 13 '13 at 18:47

answered Jun 13 '13 at 18:39

Michael Banzon

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by "a blank line" would that indicate a cr/lf or a single cr, or a single lf followed by the body, for example if the body was "hello world", what would this look like if you did it manually over telnet to a webserver on port 80? – alphablender Jun 13 '13 at 18:41
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According to the HTTP standard (RFC 2616) it is a `CR LF` sequence. – Michael Banzon Jun 13 '13 at 18:45
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Added a simple example. – Michael Banzon Jun 13 '13 at 18:48

What would a body in an HTTP GET look like?

1 Answers1