bash - CURL escape single quote

Question

How can I make this work?

curl -XPOST 'http://localhost:9290/location/place' -d '{"geoloc": {"lat": "38.1899", "lon": "-76.5087"}, "longitude": "-76.5087", "admin_name1": "Maryland", "admin_name2": "St. Mary's", "admin_name3": "", "postal_code": "20692", "admin_code3": "", "country_code": "US", "admin_code1": "MD", "latitude": "38.1899", "admin_code2": "037", "accuracy": null, "place_name": "Valley Lee"}'

The ' in Mary's is causing this to fail. I am running it from a file like cat curl-cmd.txt | sh but it won't work from the command line either. I've tried using ' and \' and u0027 (the unicode ')

I'm stuck

Answer 1

I had the same problem. The simplest solution is to escape the apostrophe with a backslash in addition to wrapping it in a set of single quotes. '''

For your use case, change Mary's to Mary'''s and it should work.

curl -XPOST 'http://localhost:9290/location/place' -d '{"geoloc": {"lat": "38.1899", "lon": "-76.5087"}, "longitude": "-76.5087", "admin_name1": "Maryland", "admin_name2": "St. Mary'''s", "admin_name3": "", "postal_code": "20692", "admin_code3": "", "country_code": "US", "admin_code1": "MD", "latitude": "38.1899", "admin_code2": "037", "accuracy": null, "place_name": "Valley Lee"}'

An alternate approach is to wrap the POST data (-d) in double quotes while escaping all nested occurrences of double quotes in the JSON string with a backslash.

curl -XPOST 'http://localhost:9290/location/place' -d "{"geoloc": {"lat": "38.1899", "lon": "-76.5087"}, "longitude": "-76.5087", "admin_name1": "Maryland", "admin_name2": "St. Mary's", "admin_name3": "", "postal_code": "20692", "admin_code3": "", "country_code": "US", "admin_code1": "MD", "latitude": "38.1899", "admin_code2": "037", "accuracy": null, "place_name": "Valley Lee"}"