Re: Huge POST requests with WGET & "multipart/form-data"

[Tim Rühsen]

On 01.12.19 12:48, Taylor wrote:
> Huge POST requests with WGET & "multipart/form-data"
> ----------------------------------------------------
> 
> Hello
> 
> I have been using WGET for many years and appreciate it.
> Unfortunately I recently ran into trouble due to changed
> behaviour of some servers. Some POST requests started to
> fail silently with error code 4. No error or rejection
> message is showed. Even "-d" does not bring up any useful
> hints. The thing simply aborts the communication after having
> tried to send the POST-data. Finally I figured out that the
> server apparently started rejecting POST-data if it is
> bigger than 8 KiO and expects "multipart/form-data" instead.
> 
> RTFM:
> 
>> In particular, they both expect content of the form
>> key1=value1&key2=value2, with percent-encoding for special characters;
>> the only difference is that one expects its content as a command-line
>> parameter and the other accepts its content from a file. In particular,
>> "--post-file" is not for transmitting files as form attachments:
>> those must appear as key=value data (with appropriate percent-coding)
>> just like everything else. Wget does not currently support
>> multipart/form-data for transmitting POST data; only
>> application/x-www-form-urlencoded.
> ...
>> Currently, "--body-file" is not for transmitting files as a whole.
>> Wget does not currently support multipart/form-data for transmitting
>> data; only application/x-www-form-urlencoded. In the future, this may
>> be changed so that wget sends the "--body-file" as a complete file
>> instead of sending its contents to the server.
> 
> I am less smart than I would like to be after having read this,
> especially the statement "sends the "--body-file" as a complete
> file instead of sending its contents" is incomprehensible to me.
> 
> How can I send huge POST requests via "multipart/form-data" now ?
> 
> * Can this be workarounded with existing WGET versions (prepare
>   data manually and use "--body-file" to send "raw" data) ?

You can, see second answer at
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=wget+to+upload+data&t=ffab.

But indeed, as Daniel says, curl's support for form-data is much better.
Curl does the form-data encoding for you while for wget you have to do
it manually.

> * Is there a chance that WGET will support "multipart/form-data"
>   soon (apparently this has been on the wishlist for a long time) ?

Planned for Wget2.

Regards, Tim

signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature