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I am currently programming an API that gets passed data via get parameters so I was wondering if the total length of the URL or of the parameters value is limited in best practice or by the protocol.
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If you are using the GET method, you are limited to a maximum of 2,048 characters, minus the number of characters in the actual path. However, the POST method is not limited by the size of the URL for submitting name/value pairs.
As already mentioned, HTTP itself doesn't impose any hard-coded limit on request length; but browsers have limits ranging on the 2048 character allowed in the GET method.
GET requests don't have a request body, so all parameters must appear in the URL or in a header. While the HTTP standard doesn't define a limit for how long URLs or headers can be, mostHTTP clients and servers have a practical limit somewhere between 2 kB and 8 kB.
The official documentation specifies a maximum length of 2048 characters for the <loc> element, which is used to submit URLs: URL of the page. This URL must begin with the protocol (e.g. “http”) and end with a trailing slash if required by the web server. This value must not exceed 2,048 characters.
Basically, 2K is the most you can rely on in a cross-browser fashion, but if you drop support for IE 8 and below, you can get to like 64K.
Although I feel I need to question your need to know this, anything over say.. 100 characters would best be handled through a POST request instead of a GET.
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Just to add the canonical reference... from the HTTP 1.1 RFC, in section 3.2.1:
The HTTP protocol does not place any a priori limit on the length of a URI. Servers MUST be able to handle the URI of any resource they serve, and SHOULD be able to handle URIs of unbounded length if they provide GET-based forms that could generate such URIs. A server SHOULD return 414 (Request-URI Too Long) status if a URI is longer than the server can handle (see section 10.4.15).
Note: Servers ought to be cautious about depending on URI lengths above 255 bytes, because some older client or proxy implementations might not properly support these lengths.
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