how to get curl to output only http response body (json) and no other headers etc

Rishi picture Rishi · Jun 17, 2014 · Viewed 228.7k times · Source

I am using curl in a bash script to fetch the response of a service as below,

response=$(curl -isb -H "Accept: application/json" "http://host:8080/some/resource")

Service response is of json type and on browser I could perfectly fine response.
However curl response has other unwanted things (such as set-cookie, content-length header in this case) and sometimes the actual response is eaten up.

Here is the output of echo $response >

 Set-Cookie: rack.session=BAh7CEkiD3Nlc3Npb25faWQGOgZFVEkiRWJlY2JiOTE2M2Q1ZWI4NThjMDdi%0AYjRiOWRjMGMxMGEwYTBkMjE3NmJhZDVjYzY4YjY4ZTlmMTE2ZGVkYWE3MTMG%0AOwBGS
SIJY3NyZgY7AEZJIiVhZmQ2MmUyZGMxMzFmOGEwMjg3NDlhNWM3YmVm%0AN2FjNwY7AEZJIg10cmFja2luZwY7AEZ7B0kiFEhUVFBfVVNFUl9BR0VOVAY7%0AAFRJIi00MTc0OGM2MWNkMzljZTYxNzY3ZjU0
Y2I5OTdiYWRkN2MyNTBkYmU4%0ABjsARkkiGUhUVFBfQUNDRVBUX0xBTkdVQUdFBjsAVEkiLWRhMzlhM2VlNWU2%0AYjRiMGQzMjU1YmZlZjk1NjAxODkwYWZkODA3MDkGOwBG%0A--ee97a62095e7d42129
 tontent-Length: 354c8; path=/; HttpOnly

This is breaking my response parsing logic.
I have seen this happening intermittently which is weird.

Is there a way to get "only" json response from curl output?
I went through the curl documentation but could not see any thing/ or I could have missed it.
Appreciate any help! Thx

Answer

Remy Lebeau picture Remy Lebeau · Jun 17, 2014

You are specifying the -i option:

-i, --include

(HTTP) Include the HTTP-header in the output. The HTTP-header includes things like server-name, date of the document, HTTP-version and more...

Simply remove that option from your command line:

response=$(curl -sb -H "Accept: application/json" "http://host:8080/some/resource")