Answer by lancepants for Passing a URL with brackets to curl

I was getting this error though there were no (obvious) brackets in my URL, and in my situation the --globoff command will not solve the issue.

For example (doing this on on mac in iTerm2):

for endpoint in $(grep some_string output.txt); do curl "http://1.2.3.4/api/v1/${endpoint}" ; done

I have grep aliased to "grep --color=always". As a result, the above command will result in this error, with some_string highlighted in whatever colour you have grep set to:

curl: (3) bad range in URL position 31:http://1.2.3.4/api/v1/lalalasome_stringlalala

The terminal was transparently translating the [colour\codes]some_string[colour\codes] into the expected no-special-characters URL when viewed in terminal, but behind the scenes the colour codes were being sent in the URL passed to curl, resulting in brackets in your URL.

Solution is to not use match highlighting.