JSON

JSON awareness in the curl tool

This page is for brainstorming and gather ideas and suggestions on how to improve curl when used to send and receive JSON formatted data.

These are ideas and a proposal. We should improve, discard, replace and add to them.

Discuss it here also seen on hackernews and reddit

--json -|<data>|@filename

curl --json [whatever] http://example.com

A shortcut. Equals doing -d [whatever] -H "Content-Type: application/json". This also supports @- to read JSON from stdin and @filename to read it from a given file. Does not check/verify that the data is actually conforming JSON.

--jp [part]

('jp' as short for "JSON part")

Build a JSON request body, and use the request header Content-Type: application/json.

Multiple --jp options can be provided on the same command line to add multiple parts to the body.

[part] is an instruction how to build JSON content

The idea is to be able to create and pass on most simple JSON data bodies and allow scripts and users to pass in parts of that data as shell variables etc when required (== handle quoting conveniently).

(Syntax inspired by jo)

Idea of how it could work

Input:

--jp a=b

Body sent:

{
   "a": "b"
}

Input:

--jp a=b --jp c=d --jp e=2 --jp f=false

Body:

{
   "a": "b",
   "c": "d",
   "e": 2,
   "f": false
}

Input:

--jp '[]="Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday"'

Body:

[
  "Monday",
  "Tuesday",
  "Wednesday",
  "Thursday"
]

Input:

--jp map=europe --jp prime[]=13 --jp prime[]=17 --jp target[x]=-10 --jp target[y]=32

{
  "map": "europe",
  "prime": [
    13,
    17
  ],
  "target": {
    "x": -10,
    "y": 32
  }
}

JSON response

Not particular handling. Pipe output to jq or similar.