BASH - Split CURL command into multiple lines - bash

Question

I have a working curl command that I'd like to split out to make it easier to read.
curl d "valuea=1234&valueb=4567&valuec=87979&submit=Set" -XPOST "http://$ipa/school.cgi" > /dev/null
I've tried several ways to do this, but none seems to work.
curl -d "valuea=1234"\
-d "valueb=4567"\
-d "valuec=87979"\
-d "submit=Set"\
-XPOST "http://$ipa/school.cgi"
curl -d "valuea=1234\
valueb=4567\
valuec=87979\
submit=Set"\
-XPOST "http://$ipa/school.cgi"
Can someone advise how to do it ?
Thanks

Answer 1

The first approach is right, I experienced problems with spreading commands on multiple lines on some environments which were trimming whitespaces, hence it's a good idea to add a space before the backslashes:
curl -d "valuea=1234" \
-d "valueb=4567" \
-d "valuec=87979" \
-d "submit=Set" \
-XPOST "http://$ipa/school.cgi"
Eventually try it against a simple service which will inform you on what's receiving, like this one:
// echorequest.js
const http = require('http');
const hostname = '0.0.0.0';
const port = 3001;
const server = http.createServer((req, res) => {
console.log(`\n${req.method} ${req.url}`);
console.log(req.headers);
res.statusCode = 200;
res.setHeader('Content-Type', 'text/plain');
let data = '';
req.on('data', function(chunk) {
data += chunk
});
req.on('end', function() {
console.log('BODY: ' + data);
res.end(data + "\n");
});
});
server.listen(port, hostname, () => {
console.log(`Server running at http://localhost:${port}/`);
});
... run by node echorequest.js (& change target of the command: -XPOST "localhost:3001")

Answer 2

Also second approach could works by adding missing '&'.
For example
POST:
curl http://url -d \
"valuea=1234&\
valueb=4567&\
valuec=87979&\
submit=Set"
GET:
curl "http://url?valuea=1234&\
valueb=4567&\
valuec=87979&\
submit=Set"
If you need a service on the fly where to test your requests, try https://requestbin.fullcontact.com/