Yikes, this took far too long to figure out!
I have a service which takes plain text multi-line input and outputs an object for each line, something like this:
Input
Line 1
Line 2
Line 3
Output
[
{line: "Line 1"},
{line: "Line 2"},
{line: "Line 3"}
]
There’s a bit more to it than that, but that’s the gist.
I want to test my service with cURL, trying:
curl --data "Line 1\nLine 2\nLine 3" \
-H "Content-Type: text/plain" localhost:3000/parse
This did not work. Nor did some alternatives. And I really didn’t want to have to write the text to a file and load it in.
Turns out there’s a nice little shell trick to let you use escape characters C style, use $'some\ncontent' to use ANSI C escaping. Now you can cURL with newlines!
curl --data $'Line 1\nLine 2\nLine 3' \
-H "Content-Type: text/plain" localhost:3000/parse
Enjoy!