Curl GET on CMD line with spaces in file name

Question

Trying to download a file through CMD line but I have spaces in the filename preventing the download.

curl --request GET -v --user user$site:password https://www.whatever.com/uploads/Filename With Spaces.csv > /users/kanye_west/desktop/FilenameWithSpaces.csv

Tried escaping the spaces with backslash \ already to no avail

Spaces in url isn't specified as a space. Use the ASCII hex code to specify this. Your URL should be "https://www.whatever.com/uploads/Filename%20With%20Spaces.csv", where %20 means space. — alvits
– alvits, Commented Jan 22, 2016 at 3:27
a valid URI (RFC3986) cannot contain spaces, but if you enclosed the URL with double quotes it would probably still work.... — Daniel Stenberg
– Daniel Stenberg, Commented Jan 22, 2016 at 7:54
@DanielStenberg - even with double quotes, space is not allowed in urls. URLs must be encoded to accommodate space. — alvits
– alvits, Commented Jan 22, 2016 at 22:38
true, but curl will accept a URL with spaces when double quotes are used — Daniel Stenberg
– Daniel Stenberg, Commented Jan 22, 2016 at 22:39
curl will pass the space as is and web service will not know how to handle the space. Hence the need to encode the spaces. — alvits
– alvits, Commented Jan 22, 2016 at 22:43

kyun · Accepted Answer · 2021-10-14 02:16:36Z

5

Use %%20 instead of space if it is in the windows batch file. As %20 in batch file means 20th parameter. So for encoding % is used %%.

edited Oct 14, 2021 at 2:16

kyun

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answered Oct 13, 2021 at 22:05

user14128219

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Comments

Salim · Accepted Answer · 2017-09-27 07:57:35Z

4

Replace each space by %20

curl --request GET -v --user user$site:password https://www.whatever.com/uploads/Filename%20With%20Spaces.csv > /users/kanye_west/desktop/FilenameWithSpaces.csv

answered Sep 27, 2017 at 7:57

Salim

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Comments

Barmar · Accepted Answer · 2016-01-22 02:18:46Z

3

Put the URL in quotes.

curl --request GET -v --user user$site:password "https://www.whatever.com/uploads/Filename With Spaces.csv" > /users/kanye_west/desktop/FilenameWithSpaces.csv

Backslashes would work on Unix, but they aren't used as an escape charater on Windows because they're the original form of directory separator.

answered Jan 22, 2016 at 2:18

Barmar

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2 Comments

bennyharassi Over a year ago

I get a http 400 error when trying.. The command works fine for a file without spaces though

Barmar Over a year ago

If the URL were wrong you would get a 404 error. So the problem is probably somewhere else.

alvits · Accepted Answer · 2016-01-22 22:39:07Z

1

Here's a cheap trick to encode urls. It encodes more than just spaces.

urlencode() {
    # urlencode <string>

    local length="${#1}"
    for (( i = 0; i < length; i++ )); do
        local c="${1:i:1}"
        case $c in
            [a-zA-Z0-9.~_-:/]) printf "$c" ;;
            *) printf '%%%x' \'"$c" ;;
        esac
    done
}

You can then use this function to convert your urls before passing to curl.

curl --request GET -v --user user$site:password $(urlencode "https://www.whatever.com/uploads/Filename With Spaces.csv") > /users/kanye_west/desktop/FilenameWithSpaces.csv

edited Jan 22, 2016 at 22:39

answered Jan 22, 2016 at 3:57

alvits

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Comments

KalenGi · Accepted Answer · 2025-02-13 20:12:36Z

0

The quoted url wasn't working in my case and I really did not want to have to manually embed the %20. So I turned to powershell to urlencode:

powershell "\"url=\"\"\" + [uri]::EscapeUriString(\"https://www.whatever.com/uploads/Filename With Spaces.csv\") + \"\"\"\"" > yaddah.txt && curl --request GET -v --user user$site:password -K yaddah.txt

Powershell encodes the spaces and then saves the resulting url parameter to a file, which is in turn used as an input to curl.

answered Feb 13 at 20:12

KalenGi

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