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

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' 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)

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
  }
}

Not particular handling. Pipe output to jq or similar.