The GET method sends the encoded user information appended to the page request. The page and the encoded information are separated by the ? character as follows −
https://www.test.com/cgi-bin/hello.py?key1=value1&key2=value2
The GET method is the default method to pass information from browser to web server and it produces a long string that appears in your browser's Location:box. Never use GET method if you have password or other sensitive information to pass to the server.
The GET method has size limitation: only 1024 characters can be sent in a request string. The GET method sends information using QUERY_STRING header and will be accessible in your CGI Program through QUERY_STRING environment variable.
You can pass information by simply concatenating key and value pairs along with any URL or you can use HTML <FORM> tags to pass information using GET method.
Simple URL Example:Get Method
Here is a simple URL, which passes two values to hello_get.py program using GET method.
Below is hello_get.py script to handle input given by web browser. We are going to use cgi module, which makes it very easy to access passed information −
Example
#!/usr/bin/python
# Import modules for CGI handling
import cgi, cgitb
# Create instance of FieldStorage
form = cgi.FieldStorage()
# Get data from fields
first_name = form.getvalue('first_name')
last_name = form.getvalue('last_name')
print "Content-type:text/html\r\n\r\n"
print "<html>"
print "<head>"
print "<title>Hello - Second CGI Program</title>"
print "</head>"
print "<body>"
print "<h2>Hello %s %s</h2>" % (first_name, last_name)
print "</body>"
print "</html>"Output
This would generate the following result −
Hello ZARA ALI
Simple FORM Example:GET Method
This example passes two values using HTML FORM and submit button. We use same CGI script hello_get.py to handle this input.
<form action = "/cgi-bin/hello_get.py" method = "get"> First Name: <input type = "text" name = "first_name"> <br /> Last Name: <input type = "text" name = "last_name" /> <input type = "submit" value = "Submit" /> </form>
Output
Here is the actual output of the above form, you enter First and Last Name and then click submit button to see the result.
