Verbose flag changes what is sent to stdout

[christophe-riolo]

Hello,
For the context, as part of my work I need to check the headers I send in addition of what I receive as response, so because of that I use the verbose -v flag. I also often pass the output through the jq command, but those are not really compatible because the verbose flag changes the stdout value. Here are some tests I did, removing some headers to make it shorter (forgive the fish shell syntax for piping)

# regulat call sends just the body to STDOUT but everything to STDERR
~> xh  https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/todos/1 1>| cat
{
  "userId": 1,
  "id": 1,
  "title": "delectus aut autem",
  "completed": false
}

~> xh  https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/todos/1 2>| cat
HTTP/2.0 200 OK
content-type: application/json; charset=utf-8
date: Thu, 11 Dec 2025 08:54:32 GMT
(...)

{
    "userId": 1,
    "id": 1,
    "title": "delectus aut autem",
    "completed": false
}


# With the verbose flag, everything is sent to STDOUT as well as STDERR
~> xh -v https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/todos/1 1>| cat
GET /todos/1 HTTP/1.1
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br, zstd
User-Agent: xh/0.25.0
Connection: keep-alive
Accept: */*
Host: jsonplaceholder.typicode.com

HTTP/2.0 200 OK
date: Thu, 11 Dec 2025 08:55:31 GMT
content-type: application/json; charset=utf-8
(...)

{
  "userId": 1,
  "id": 1,
  "title": "delectus aut autem",
  "completed": false
}

~> xh -v https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/todos/1 2>| cat
GET /todos/1 HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br, zstd
Connection: keep-alive
Host: jsonplaceholder.typicode.com
User-Agent: xh/0.25.0

HTTP/2.0 200 OK
content-type: application/json; charset=utf-8
date: Thu, 11 Dec 2025 09:00:17 GMT
(...)

{
    "userId": 1,
    "id": 1,
    "title": "delectus aut autem",
    "completed": false
}

This is kinda related to #436 as with that option I could also redirect the request and response headers to STDERR, but I still think it should be seen as a separate issue, as even with the possibility to redirect some parts to STDERR, the default verbose output should probably behave the same as the default output

[ducaale]

The default is to only output response body when we detect that stdout is not tty. However, -v tells xh to output everything to stdout. You can use xh-command-here 1> output.txt 2> error.txt to see what exactly goes to stdout vs stderr.

You can use -d/--download to send everything except response body to stderr. This is not a perfect solution for xh+jq as there is no way to hide the download progress metadata

$ xh -v -d httpbingo.org/json | jq .slideshow.slides[0]
GET /json HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Encoding: identity
Connection: keep-alive
Host: httpbingo.org
User-Agent: xh/0.25.0

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Access-Control-Allow-Credentials: true
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *
Content-Length: 421
Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8
Date: Thu, 11 Dec 2025 16:22:17 GMT
Fly-Request-Id: 01KC73GTY8MYHDZM0QPX4C1F8D-arn
Server: Fly/c51817cfd (2025-12-11)
Via: 1.1 fly.io, 1.1 fly.io

Downloading 421 B to "<stdout>"
Done. 421 B in 0.00040s (1.00 MiB/s)
{
  "title": "Wake up to WonderWidgets!",
  "type": "all"
}

I wonder if we should remove the progress metadata when output is being redirected? or maybe we can introduce an option similar to -d/--download that doesn't show the download progress?

[christophe-riolo]

Ah indeed -d saves the day in my case, it was not obvious that when piped it would not create a file but print to stdout ! As far as I'm concerned I have no blocker anymore at least 😄

My personal feeling, is that there should be two formatters, one for stdout (that already exists in the form of --print) and one for stderr (could be --print-stderr, -e), and that we would have the following equivalents

• xh <url> would be the same as xh -p 'b' -e 'hb' <url> like it already is now as it seems
• xh -v <url> would be the same as xh -p 'b' -e 'HhBb' --all <url>, enabling easy piping