Support curl embed content of a file as text field in multipart/form-data request

[meixger]

Problem to solve

I want to send multipart/form-data request and set the contents for a text field from a file.
Don't attach it as a file upload by adding a filename= to the Content-Disposition.

Instead of

--delimiter
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="field1"; filename="value1.txt"

value1
--delimiter--

i want

--delimiter
Content-Disposition: form-data; name="field1"

value1
--delimiter--

Proposal

Use embedfile instead of file:

POST https://example.org/api
[MultipartFormData]
field1: embedfile,value1.txt

Additional context and resources

Curl`s documentation https://curl.se/docs/manpage.html#-F

To just get the content part from a file, prefix the filename with the symbol <. The difference between @ and < is then that @ makes a file get attached in the post as a file upload, while the < makes a text field and just get the contents for that text field from a file.

[jcamiel]

Hi @meixger

Do I understand correctly your use case if I emulate it by injecting a variable:

$ value1=`cat file.txt` 
$ hurl --variable value1="$value1" form.hurl

with form.hurl being:

POST http://localhost:8000
[MultipartFormData]
field1: {{value1}}

Instead of injecting the value of file.txt, you want to be able to do:

POST http://localhost:8000
[MultipartFormData]
field1: {{ getFile "file.txt" }}

[meixger]

Hi @jcamiel

Do I understand correctly your use case if I emulate it by injecting a variable:

Yes.

I assume the proposed function getFile would load the content of file.txt and insert it as the value of field1.

[jcamiel]

Yes exactly, we have "functions" today https://hurl.dev/docs/templates.html#functions, we can imagine having a function getFile that returns the content of a file.

Some things to not forget (for the implementation)

• content of the file: binary vs text
• security: restrict the ablity to upload any local file i.e.: forbid {{ getFile "/etc/passwd" }}