cURL POST --data-binary vs --form

Question

I have a simple question regarding to the usage of cURL. Didn't find much during my Google search or Man page to get a clear answer.

In here talks about using either --data vs --form on sending file/attachment. I'm curious to know what are the main difference and under what scenarios you would pick --data-binary VS --form ?

The POST "body" can be sent via either --data (for application/x-www-form-urlencoded) or --form (for multipart/form-data):

-F "foo=bar"                  # 'foo' value is 'bar'
-F "foo=<foovalue.txt"        # the specified file is sent as plain text input
-F "[email protected]"        # the specified file is sent as an attachment

-d "foo=bar"
-d "foo=<foovalue.txt"
-d "[email protected]"
-d "@entirebody.txt"          # the specified file is used as the POST body

--data-binary "@binarybody.jpg"

Ceasar · Accepted Answer · 2014-11-12 19:25:56Z

13

The difference is explained in the HTML 4.01 Specification section on Forms:

application/x-www-form-urlencoded is the default content type.

The content type "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" is inefficient for sending large quantities of binary data or text containing non-ASCII characters. The content type "multipart/form-data" should be used for submitting forms that contain files, non-ASCII data, and binary data.

answered Nov 12, 2014 at 19:25

Ceasar

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1 Comment

Sebastian Over a year ago

Would it fail if the content-type is specified as "multipart/form-data", but they send it as --data-binary, when using curl?

favoretti · Accepted Answer · 2012-12-28 01:12:07Z

4

That's exactly the main difference, type of data that's being sent to the server (application/x-www-form-urlencoded vs multipart/form-data)

answered Dec 28, 2012 at 1:12

favoretti

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1 Comment

samxiao Over a year ago

Thanks! What are the scenarios you will use either type of data? so form-urlencoded is for embedded the data into the request, but multipart is different?

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