Ytukyg

Trying to understand how an HTTP request sends the arguments and their values when I do an HTTP request. For example, if I buy a plane ticket on expedia.com I have to fill in passenger names and credit card details on the browser.

After I press the Book button, I see the URL becomes:

https://www.expedia.com.my/FlightCheckout?tripid=53babb4a-6f91-43cc-a864-6fa5425b74ef&c=78f285ce-0cbf-4914-8fc4-a7bd48312ba3

Naively, I would expect something like this instead:

`https://www.expedia.com.my/FlightCheckout?names=John,Marry&surnames=Smith,Back&credit_card_no=4213877918771999`

Is Expedia is making a request to an API? How are the data being send then?

For sensetive information, usually a POST request is used. If you want to understand what's going on, simply use the site (press F12 to open the developer tools, go to the Network tab, ensure that the logs are preserved) [this highly depends on the Browser you're using] and you'll see several requests while using the site. What Expedia obviously does is to store your information into a tripid which seems to be the primary key for the session / booking or whatever. So yeah, even a GET request can be considered to be an API call to FlightCheckout.

Some information like filters can be transmitted via URL since they are not sensible information. But you don't want sensible data like transactions, addresses and names to be visible in the URL for security reasons. That's why they are transmitted via POST Requests, you may want to take a look at the HTTP Wikipedia Page for a first introduction into this topic. There should be many learning resources for HTTP Requests and Request Types around the web.