How to PUT a json object with an array using curl

Your command line should have a -d/--data inserted before the string you want to send in the PUT, and you want to set the Content-Type and not Accept.

curl -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -X PUT -d '[JSON]' \
     http://example.com/service

Using the exact JSON data from the question, the full command line would become:

curl -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -X PUT \
    -d '{"tags":["tag1","tag2"],
         "question":"Which band?",
         "answers":[{"id":"a0","answer":"Answer1"},
                    {"id":"a1","answer":"answer2"}]}' \
    http://example.com/service

Note: JSON data wrapped only for readability, not valid for curl request.

Although the original post had other issues (i.e. the missing "-d"), the error message is more generic.

curl: (3) [globbing] nested braces not supported at pos X

This is because curly braces {} and square brackets [] are special globbing characters in curl. To turn this globbing off, use the "-g" option.

As an example, the following Solr facet query will fail without the "-g" to turn off curl globbing: curl -g 'http://localhost:8983/solr/query?json.facet={x:{terms:"myfield"}}'

It should be mentioned that the Accept header tells the server something about what we are accepting back, whereas the relevant header in this context is Content-Type

It's often advisable to specify Content-Type as application/json when sending JSON. For curl the syntax is:

-H 'Content-Type: application/json'

So the complete curl command will be:

curl -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -H 'Accept: application/json' -X PUT -d '{"tags":["tag1","tag2"],"question":"Which band?","answers":[{"id":"a0","answer":"Answer1"},{"id":"a1","answer":"answer2"}]}' http://example.com/service`