Nested params with cURL?

Question

I've got an iPhone app requesting an API, and it uses a nested param structure to pass in a username and password to login.

In my Rails controller, I'm successfully retrieving this information normally using:

username = param[:session][:username]

I'd like to test my API from shell, using cURL. But I can't figure out how to provide nested params? The code below does NOT work... And I've tried multiple variations. But just can't seem to figure it out?

curl -d '{"session":{"username":"test","password":"password"}}' http://testurl/remote/v1/sessions

Any help, much appreciated!

score 62 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 05 '10 at 03:54

62

Different frameworks may interpret http query params differently, but for rails you should be able to get away with the following:

curl -d 'session[username]=name&session[password]=pwd' http://testurl/remote/v1/sessions

answered Oct 05 '10 at 03:54

Joseph Rodriguez

1,135
9
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10 years later, but this causes a unexpected token parse error – Trip Feb 04 '21 at 13:15

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 06 '18 at 09:50

0

I found this to work. Given a JSON blob like

{ "opts": {
    "finder": { 
      "cname":"superlatives"
    }
  }
}



curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -X POST \
  --data-binary '{"opts":{"finder":{"cname":"superlatives"}}}' \
  http://YOURSERVER.com/api/grams/one

answered Nov 06 '18 at 09:50

dcsan

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15
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note that just `--data` strips CR and LF so you could use that too if you want to pretty print your JSON – dcsan Nov 06 '18 at 09:51

Nested params with cURL?

2 Answers2

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