Syntax

POST <request-target>["?"<query>] HTTP/1.1

<request-target>

Identifies the target resource of the request when combined with the information provided in the Host header. This is an absolute path (e.g., /path/to/file.html) in requests to an origin server, and an absolute URL in requests to proxies (e.g., http://www.example.com/path/to/file.html).

<query> Optional

An optional query component preceded by a question-mark ?. Often used to carry identifying information in the form of key=value pairs.

Examples

URL-encoded form submission

A form using application/x-www-form-urlencoded content encoding (the default) sends a request where the body contains the form data in key=value pairs, with each pair separated by an & symbol, as shown below:

POST /test HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Length: 27

field1=value1&field2=value2

Multipart form submission

The multipart/form-data encoding is used when a form includes files or a lot of data. This request body delineates each part of the form using a boundary string. An example of a request in this format:

POST /test HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com
Content-Type: multipart/form-data;boundary="delimiter12345"

--delimiter12345
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="field1"

value1
--delimiter12345
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="field2"; filename="example.txt"

value2
--delimiter12345--

The Content-Disposition header indicates how the form data should be processed, specifying the field name and filename, if appropriate.

Specifications

Browser compatibility

See also

• HTTP request methods
• HTTP response status codes
• HTTP headers
• Content-Type header
• Content-Disposition header
• GET method