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(The following is backstory, you can jump down to "Question:" if you'd like)

There's a webpage for one of my courses that accepts input text (expected to be Python code) and then gives some tokenized response. It's meant to be used as a reference for the Python lexers we're writing. I'm trying to automate my testing process and be able to check my code without opening a browser, copying text back and forth, etc. So here's what I'm trying to do:

I've got a sample python file named "x.py" and I want to post it to the server as if I had filled out that form. I've tried:

curl --data-urlencode "file=@x.py" http://matt.might.net/apps/pylex/pylex.php

But unfortunately, that's not working right because apparently "@x.py" is getting posted as my file contents (that is, "file=@x.py" is what's getting posted, not "file=<contents-of-x.py>"). I've tried --form and --data but those haven't worked either.

Question: Specifically, if I have a file with non-url-encoded contents, and the contents of this file needs to be part of a POST and associated with a particular name (in this case, file), what's the correct way of accomplishing this?

Cornstalks
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2 Answers2

27

What you want is "file@x.py" (no =).

From the curl manpage:

name@filename This will make curl load data from the given file (including any newlines), URL-encode that data and pass it on in the POST. The name part gets an equal sign appended, resulting in name=urlencoded-file-content. Note that the name is expected to be URL-encoded already.

guypursey
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qmega
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2

I'll leave qmega's answer as the accepted one, but I'll put an answer I left in a comment here too for easier reading. One other way to do this is simply by specifyping "file=`cat x.py`". For the full command, it would be:

curl --data-urlencode "file=`cat x.py`" http://matt.might.net/apps/pylex/pylex.php
Cornstalks
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