Get both the headers and the body of a curl response in two separated variables?

Question

I am looking for a way to make ONE curl call and get to variables from it: one with the headers and another with the response body.

I've found several questions asking about how to separate headers from body, but people seems only interested in one of them. I need both headers and body.

I cannot use an external file to store the body (thus using -o $file is not an option).

I can use

headers=$(curl -D /dev/stdout $URL)

to get the headers into one variable, but how can I redirect the output to another variable?

Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

I would like to share a way to parse curl response without any external program, bash only.

First, get the response of a curl request passing -sw "%{http_code}".

res=$(curl -sw "%{http_code}" $url)

The result will be a string containing the body followed by the http code.

Then, get the http code:

http_code="${res:${#res}-3}"

And the body:

if [ ${#res} -eq 3 ]; then
  body=""
else
  body="${res:0:${#res}-3}"
fi

Note that if the length of http_code and response are equal (length 3), body is empty. Else, just strip out the http code and you get the body.