Why is my CURL command using the last.fm api not working?

Question

I just started learning bash and I wanted to implement the last.fm API using the curl command. I tried executing following command:

curl http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/?method=tag.gettopalbums&tag=disco&api_key=(my API KEY)&format=json

but for some reason it gives me the error code 6 "invalid parameters". If I open the link normally it works just fine.

I tried

curl -v http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/?method=tag.gettopalbums&tag=disco&api_key=(my API KEY)&format=json

and saw

HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request

But I don't really know what that means.

Answer 1

As stated by Taylor G. you need to enclose the URL in quotation marks as for example the & in that URL would be interpreted as a new command.

Executing the following

curl -v "http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/?method=tag.gettopalbums&tag=disco&api_key=api_key&format=json"

will give me this output:

> GET http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/2.0/?method=tag.gettopalbums&tag=disco&api_key=api_key&format=json HTTP/1.1
> Host: ws.audioscrobbler.com
> User-Agent: curl/7.81.0
> Accept: */*
> Proxy-Connection: Keep-Alive
> 
* Mark bundle as not supporting multiuse
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Server: openresty/1.13.6.2
< Date: Fri, 30 Jun 2023 09:01:33 GMT
< Content-Type: application/json; charset=UTF-8
< Content-Length: 34591
< Access-Control-Request-Headers: Origin, X-Atmosphere-tracking-id, X-Atmosphere-Framework, X-Cache-Date, Content-Type, X-Atmosphere-Transport, *
< Access-Control-Allow-Methods: POST, GET, OPTIONS
< Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
< Access-Control-Max-Age: 86400
< Via: 1.1 google
< Proxy-Connection: Keep-Alive
< Connection: Keep-Alive
< 

{
    "albums": {
        "album": [
            {
                "name": "Dynamite",
                "mbid": "",
                "url": "https://www.last.fm/music/BTS",
                "artist": {
                    "name": "BTS",
                    "mbid": "0d79fe8e-ba27-4859-bb8c-2f255f346853",
                    "url": "https://www.last.fm/music/BTS"
                },
                "image": [
                    {
                        "#text": "https://lastfm.freetls.fastly.net/i/u/34s/41b15d8a0ad6a81323b598bfb19cede9.png",
                        "size": "small"
                    },
                    {
                        "#text": "https://lastfm.freetls.fastly.net/i/u/64s/41b15d8a0ad6a81323b598bfb19cede9.png",
                        "size": "medium"
                    },
                    {
                        "#text": "https://lastfm.freetls.fastly.net/i/u/174s/41b15d8a0ad6a81323b598bfb19cede9.png",
                        "size": "large"
[..]

Also you wrote:

I saw HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request but I don't really know what that means.

In such cases it might be worth looking at the response body as it may contain more information. Here is the response body for the curl request without quotation marks:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<lfm status="failed">
  <error code="6">Invalid parameters - Your request is missing a required parameter</error>
</lfm>

APIs often have these error messages so you don't need to rely only on the HTTP status code.