GET method doesn't support body payload

[ZhymabekRoman]

It would be nice to be able to send a body with a GET request. I understand that this may not be considered a good practice, but this is necessary for the API that I have to work with.

RFC 2616, section 4.3 clearly states:

A message-body MUST NOT be included in a request if the specification of the request method (section 5.1.1) does not allow sending an entity-body in requests.
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-4.3

However, in the entirety of section 9.3, the section defining the GET verb, nothing prevents a GET request from having a body.

But before you draw any conclusions - the functionality defined for the GET verb also does not include any logic involving the message body.

In other words, if we are to follow the specification:

1. It is possible to send a message body with a GET request per specification.
2. However, the server responding to the GET request must ignore the body to follow the standard.

Essentially, there is no point, per standard, to send a body with a GET request, even though it is not explicitly disallowed.

Roy T. Fielding backs this interpretation up:

...any HTTP request message is allowed to contain a message body, and thus must parse messages with that in mind. Server semantics for GET, however, are restricted such that a body, if any, has no semantic meaning to the request. The requirements on parsing are separate from the requirements on method semantics.
So, yes, you can send a body with GET, and no, it is never useful to do so.
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/rest-discuss/conversations/messages/9962

More about this: swagger-api/swagger-ui#2136

[ZhymabekRoman]

I know there is a way around this using httpx.request("GET", data=...), but this is a workaround, in requests this functionality is implemented out of the box

[florimondmanca]

Hi @ZhymabekRoman

HTTPX does not disallow sending bodies on any method. We don’t allow it in the shortcut methods, but it is fully allowed with the usage you mentioned, which is not a workaround but the documented and supported way to do so, as per the Requests compatibility guide:

https://www.python-httpx.org/compatibility/#request-body-on-http-methods

If you really do need to send request data using these http methods you should use the generic .request function instead.

httpx.request(
  method="DELETE",
  url="https://www.example.com/",
  content=b'A request body on a DELETE request.'
)

There has been extensive thinking behind this design decision and various discussions already. Please feel free to search through the issue tracker.

I’ll move this to a discussion. Thanks!