Special characters like @ and & in cURL POST data

Question

How do I include special characters like @ and & in the cURL POST data? I'm trying to pass a name and password like: ``` curl -d name=john passwd=@31&3*J https://www.mysite.com ``` This would cause problems as `@` is used for loading files and `&` for specifying more than one key/value. Is there some way I can escape these characters? `\@` and `\&` don't seem to work.

Accepted Answer

cURL > 7.18.0 has an option `--data-urlencode` which solves this problem. Using this, I can simply send a POST request as

```
curl -d name=john --data-urlencode passwd=@31&3*J https://www.example.com
```

Summarizing the comments, in case of mixed "good" and "bad" data and exclamation marks inside we can use on Windows:

```
curl -d "grant_type=client_credentials&client_id=super-client&acr_values=tenant:TNT123" --data-urlencode "client_secret=XxYyZ21D8E&%fhB6kq^mXQDovSZ%Q*!ipINme" https://login.example.com/connect/token
```

Special characters like @ and & in cURL POST data

Solution

Problem