Is there a URL character limit?

Question

I clicked on an ad for a TracFone deal, and noticed the URL it went through:

http://ad.yieldmanager.com/clk?3,eJydkduSmkAQhp.GO6FmmCNF5WKAFRGJicJu8CbFSVBBXMIuq0-fdtdNKrfpmqL..rpruuYHEytjhYkpJfmO77DIkIUJL3dMUjMXU2RZFiFSGhxhJKbU9h0VGrGnbOnlsXoP36ThqD5jUVfdXVLlKjVzzPFhXn2QPUFvH8oO9eN39f.hjAvl3zVk2F-5UhlxnYhrYv8Zc4tD-JSM26cELaO6TQ75EEazJtwglhizehnldBsVxzB6bEPDJ-HfBV-m9TCcJ0RNjBmcqumytNHTvtAvad11et61gDe-NyEuZl2GskOVAQmhFlJIQnRwlTJkYhCCS46kDh5SybABcy7Mtem-uV0C0hSSIYQ5gY2bIAGaAE3UfLUC.fDj220NIYxy-BUI0BLAStbnwAuCOb7ETnpqolf-lSslInV2ZKxvs-dK2SfvAuM2jLv7hW63QeD7owZo8XklYxQhappUEsAB4L50rt11vn6sfibklW7X69PyWEFTQZNzLEwioVpDhd79AZfov4Y1-mXfVneb-mf4FGnfpJANjWgUcj20t9eXb4PWl6ei7LVfZf7Sl.qt8RvgCraA,http://insight.adsrvr.org/track/clk?sv=rightmediahosted&w=160&h=600&crid=m2ffwh5&adv=qt8fijj&cmp=fhpecrl&ag=yuq8cbh&pid=imm39f3&td_s=http%3A%2F%2Fl.yimg.com%2Frq%2Fdarla%2F2-3-4%2Fhtml%2Fext-render-secure.html&r=http://tracking.intermundomedia.com/lnd/redir.php?imm_cid=06-AJ&dest=http://offers.tracfone.com/en/samsung-r455c.htm  

That's a 942 character URL!

So I was wondering: is there a defined limit to URL length?

Answer 1

According to Microsoft the maximum character limit in IE is 2083 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/208427

According to this article other browsers can handle a far larger number of characters in the URL http://hiox.org/425-maximum-length-of-a-url.php

With that said though for cross browser compatibility most URLs probably follow the lower amount that IE supports.

Answer 2

As djmadscribbler already said there is maximum length for url's and that is why we use POST instead of GET (for example) when uploading files or submitting html forms that may not even have any limit for text typed in.

If there's no any limit for URL length then we could upload our 1GB document backup's to server using http get request but someone decided that nobody wants to see 1GB URL in their browsers address bar... maybe there's many other reasons, imagine what happens when you hit bookmark this button with that kind of URL...