cURL POST command line on WINDOWS RESTful service

Question

My problem: Using the command line tool to curl my localhost server while sending some data along with my POST request is not working.

What seems to be causing the error: Imagine something like this

1. curl -i -X POST -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{"data1": "data goes here", "data2": "data2 goes here"}' http:localhost/path/to/api

Result of the returning data

curl: (6) Could not resolve host: application; No data record of requested type curl: (6) Could not resolve host: data goes here,; No data record of requested type curl: (6) Could not resolve host: data2; No data record of requested type curl: (3) [globbing] unmatched close brace/bracket at pos 16 

After some searching i figured out that problem couldn't be the sintax used for the request since it works on UNIX shells.

Are you possibly using Windows? That so looks like a completely broken shell that doesn't properly deal with single-quotes vs double-quotes. I just tried that command line and it worked fine on my linux box. http://curl.haxx.se/mail/archive-2011-03/0066.html

I tried to work around with those " escaping it \" but it still didn't work

2.

curl -i -X POST -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{\"data1\": \"data goes here\", \"data2\": \"data2 goes here\"}' http: //localhost/path/to/api

3.

curl -i -X POST -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{\"data1\": \"data goes here\", \"data2\": \"data2 goes here\"}' http: //localhost/path/to/api

So i gave up. Windows seems to messing up with the JSON object sent on POST

Answer 1

I ran into the same issue on my win7 x64 laptop and was able to get it working using the curl release that is labeled Win64 - Generic w SSL by using the very similar command line format:

C:\Projects\curl-7.23.1-win64-ssl-sspi>curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST http://localhost/someapi -d "{\"Name\":\"Test Value\"}" 

Which only differs from your 2nd escape version by using double-quotes around the escaped ones and the header parameter value. Definitely prefer the linux shell syntax more.

Answer 2

Another Alternative for the command line that is easier than fighting with quotation marks is to put the json into a file, and use the @ prefix of curl parameters, e.g. with the following in json.txt:

{ "syncheader" : {     "servertimesync" : "20131126121749",     "deviceid" : "testDevice"   } } 

then in my case I issue:

curl localhost:9000/sync -H "Content-type:application/json" -X POST -d @json.txt 

Keeps the json more readable too.