curl write http code to stderr or to file

I found a way around this issue by using -o to redirect just the content to a temporary file, leaving just the status code in the curl's output.

I can then read the contents of the temporary file from python -m json.tool and pretty print them.

For example,

content=$(mktemp)

curl \
...
-w \
'HTTP_STATUS_CODE: %{http_code}\n' \
...
-o \
"$content" \
-- \
'https://somecompany.com/some_api_endpoint'

<"$content" python -m json.tool