DELETE using CURL with encoded URL

Question

I’m trying to make a request using CURL like this:

curl -X DELETE "https://myhost/context/path/users/OXYugGKg207g5uN/07V" 

where OXYugGKg207g5uN/07V is a hash, so I suppose that I need to encode before do this request.

I have tried curl -X DELETE --data-urlenconded "https://myhost/context/path/users/OXYugGKg207g5uN/07V"

Some ideas?

Answer 1

If really OXYugGKg207g5uN/07V is the hash then you need to encode that, not the whole url. You can use an encoding function available inside the environment you use cURL in.

Answer 2

Since you are in a bash environment, you could encode the hash OXYugGKg207g5uN/07V before passing it to curl.

A straight-forward approach would be to use its byte representation %4f%58%59%75%67%47%4b%67%32%30%37%67%35%75%4e%2f%30%37%56

To get that, call:

echo -ne "OXYugGKg207g5uN/07V" | xxd -plain | tr -d '\n' | sed 's/\(..\)/%\1/g'

It will give you: %4f%58%59%75%67%47%4b%67%32%30%37%67%35%75%4e%2f%30%37%56

The complete one-liner including curl in bash/zsh/sh/… would look like this:

curl -X DELETE "https://myhost/context/path/users/$(echo -ne "OXYugGKg207g5uN/07V" | xxd -plain | tr -d '\n' | sed 's/\(..\)/%\1/g')"

and is equivalent to

curl -X DELETE "https://myhost/context/path/users/%4f%58%59%75%67%47%4b%67%32%30%37%67%35%75%4e%2f%30%37%56"

This solution is not very pretty, but it works.
I hope you find this helpful.