DELETE Method

Table of Contents

About1

The DELETE HTTP method (HTTP verb) asks the server to delete a specified resource. It has no defined semantics for the message body, so this should be empty. Also known as DELETE request .

Characteristics

Request has bodySuccessful response has bodySafeIdempotentCacheableAllowed in HTML forms
MayMayNoYesNoNo

Syntax

DELETE <request-target>["?"<query>] HTTP/1.1
  • <request-target>: identifies the target resource of the request when combined with the information provided in the

Host header. This is an absolute path (e.g. /path/to/file.html) in requests to an origin server, and an absolute URL in requests to proxies (e.g. http://www.example.com/path/to/file.html)

  • <query> (Optional) - an optional query component preceded by a question-mark ?. Often used to carry identifying

information in the form of key=value pairs.

Examples

Successfully deleting a resource

The following request asks the server to delete the resource file.html:

DELETE /file.html HTTP/1.1
Host: example.com

If the request is successful, there are several possible success response status codes. A 204 No Content response means the request was successful and no additional information needs to be sent back to the client:

HTTP/1.1 204 No Content
Date: Tue, 06 May 2025 22:19 GMT

A 200 OK response means the request was successful and the response body includes a representation describing the outcome:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Date: Tue, 06 May 2025 22:22 GMT
Content-Length: 1234

<html>
  <body>
    <h1>File "file.html" deleted.</h1>
  </body>
</html>

A 202 Accepted response means the request has been accepted and will probably succeed, but the resource has not yet been deleted by the server:

HTTP/1.1 202 Accepted
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Date: Tue, 06 May 2025 22:23 GMT
Content-Length: 1234

<html>
  <body>
    <h1>Deletion of "file.html" accepted.</h1>
    <p>See <a href="http://example.com/tasks/123/status">the status monitor</a> for details.</p>
  </body>
</html>

Anki

References

  1. MDN. “DELETE method”. Available at: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/Methods/DELETE . (Accessed: [2025-05-06 Tue 22:12]). ↩︎

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