Passing a URL with brackets to curl

Question

If I try to pass a URL to curl that contains brackets, it fails with an error:

$ curl 'http://www.google.com/?TEST[]=1'
curl: (3) [globbing] illegal character in range specification at pos 29

However, if I escape both brackets, it appears to work:

$ curl 'http://www.google.com/?TEST\[\]=1'

Interestingly, I use a backslash to escape only the first bracket it fails silently with error code 20497:

$ curl 'http://www.google.com/?TEST\[]=1'
$ echo $!
20497

My question is how to fix this for general cases? Is there an argument that will escape URLs automatically, or a description of the characters that need to be escaped before passing to curl?

Answer 1

Nevermind, I found it in the docs:

-g/--globoff
              This  option  switches  off  the "URL globbing parser". When you set this option, you can
              specify URLs that contain the letters {}[] without having them being interpreted by  curl
              itself.  Note  that  these  letters  are not normal legal URL contents but they should be
              encoded according to the URI standard.