occasionally useful ruby, ubuntu, etc

20Aug/112

Recovering your submitted form data in Chrome

Have you ever submitted form on a website after filling in a lot of text (maybe a comment), only to get an error on the other side? And when you hit back, your nice long response is gone? There's a (sort of easy) way of retrieving it, if you don't stray from the landing page after you submit the form -- at least in Chrome.

1) Wrench icon > Tools > Developer Tools
2) Network tab
3) Click on the network request with the same name as the current page (that matches the URL)
4) Click the Headers tab in the right section of the developer tools
5) Scroll down to the section "Form Data" (you may need to Expand this section by clicking the > arrow)
6) Copy and paste your previous response into somewhere safe (Notepad?) while you attempt to resubmit the form or frame your amazing writing for later.

I'm pretty sure you can do the same thing with Firefox, but it would require you to install Firebug.

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  1. Very good idea. It’s so frustrating when the form data is lost.

  2. Thanks a lot for sharing this! You just saved me a whole lot of trouble.

    I eventually found my form submission. It was slightly altered, but easily reformatted back together. For example spaces, commas and other punctuation marks where replaced by pieces of code like “%2C”. But using the find/replace function on a text editor they were quickly changed back.

    So, thank you!


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