Performing a GET with a POST using a Data API

Sometimes you can only do a GET when you need to do a DELETE, since some systems don't support all of the HTTP verbs. Also since Flash doesn't let you set a custom Authorization header on a GET, sometimes you need to do a GET with a POST. How can you do this? With the X-HTTP-Method-Override header:

X-HTTP-Method-Override: GET

For example, say you want to perform a video search in YouTube using a POST request:

POST /feeds/api/videos HTTP/1.1
Host: gdata.youtube.com
X-HTTP-Method-Override: GET
Content-Length: 23
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded

vq=kitten&max-results=1

This is the same as performing a GET on http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?vq=kitten&max-results=1 The POST body is used as the set of query parameters. You can also do this using the curl command:

curl -H "X-HTTP-Method-Override: GET" -X POST http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos -d "vq=kitten&max-results=1"