Getting stuff via HTTP POST for the semi-n3wb

This depends on the language you want to work with; in PHP it would look something like following (returns an array containing all data): <?php $sweet_sweet_data = json_decode( file_get_contents( "http://domain.com/api?user=user_API&password=password&format=json" ) ); ?> Then just loop through the data and filter to your hearts content.

Maybe using the https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/postman/fhbjgbiflinjbdggehcddcbncdddomop?hl=en will be a little easier for you than using Curl? It lets you just paste in the body you want to send via your POST request, e.g. "user=user_API&password=password&format=json" assuming you have a valuid user_API and password. The thing is, "user=user_API&password=password&format=json" looks like the kind of thing that normally goes in a URL (an https URL) rather than a POST body. Can you give us the actual URL you are trying to post to? (Also, I don't get how streaming comes into play here. What you're doing is making a basic http request – it means you'll open a socket, make the request, get the response in its entirely, then close the socket. When you stream, you usually leave the socket open and chunks come down a bit at a time.)

The thing is, "user=user_API&password=password&format=json" looks like the kind of thing that normally goes in a URL (an https URL) rather than a POST body. There is nothing surprising about this. Payloads in a POST request are URL-encoded all the time.

What I'd like to do is pull down all data where numhex is a member of a small set, say, {aaaaaa, abaaa1, caaaa3} What I've been told is that the data is gettable via HTTP POST, and the output format is JSON. A POST request is a pretty general thing. I doubt the service you will be using returns all of the data all of the time, so you probably need to either request a dynamically generated URL or put something in the POST body to tell the server what data to give you. This is not something that can be answered in general, you'll have to ask the people providing the service for more details.

Thanks for the answers so far... I'd rather not post the actual URL, but it's of the form https://api.company.com/webservice.php if that helps... I'll get my hands on jq and Postman this evening and play around... thanks for those suggestions. I *assume* the filtering would be on the client side, as it's a fairly large amount of real-time data that I'm looking for, but I'm not 100% sure. As for streams... I know that there exists a stream of data... each object -- numhex is a unique identifier -- is having its attributes constantly updated. Whether I'm tapping the data directly, or a periodically-refreshed database at a a discrete time period, or what, I don't rightly know.