Option to get captured data without using --json

[Phantop]

Problem to solve

Currenty, the best way to get a captured value out of hurl to use for other shell scripting seems to be something like:

hurl --json sw.hurl | jq '.entries[-1].captures[] | select(.name=="json").value[]' -r

In this case, I have a captured variable name json (which itself was using Xpath and JSONpath to get some obscured JSON data from a webpage) and it's returning an array which I could then use for further scripting, particularly looping through. Needing to figure out this query is a bit of a usability negative, as I do think that there are many reasons one might want to use captured values outside of hurl.

Proposal

I suggest the additon of a -g, --get <VARIABLE> option (or something similar) that effectively just returns whatever using {{variable}} within a hurl script would have gotten at the end of the file. This significantly simplifies the tast of using captured data, and covers the case of wanting a variable from a prior entry before the end that hadn't had its value replaced (which is definitely possible using jq, but I imagine many users wouldn't want to go through the effort of writing it out if there was a simpler option..

As well, I think certain cases such as the data being a single, flat JSON array, could return the contents of the array rather than in JSON format unless --json is still specified. Multiple uses of -g could simply dump values to stdout as-is unless json output is desired, as well.

Additional context and resources

The sw.hurl file is as follows, in case that is helpful:

GET https://www.sunday-webry.com/episode/2550912964453010622
HTTP 200
[Captures]
page: url
json: xpath "string(//*[@id='episode-json']/@data-value)" jsonpath "$.readableProduct.pageStructure.pages[?(@.type=='main')].src"

Tasks to complete

n/a

[jcamiel]

I agree, a simple way of getting captured variable is a good enhancement. I wonder if, for this use case, we could reuse/extend --write-out option from curl (see for instance #1745).

With curl:

$ curl -w "Server: %header{server}\n" http://example.com will output on stdout the "Server" response header.

We can implement this, plus extend it with Hurl specificity (variables):

$ hurl --write-out "foo %variable{bar}" file.hurl would output "foo" concatenated with the value of the variable ˋbar`

[Phantop]

Oooh, that could be a pretty versatile solution. I'd honestly still argue for both ways of doing it, simply because a new user might struggle to find that --write-out option and learning even more additional syntax could be a bit of a pain.