Difference in the HTTP Response code is getting observed when executing a POST call from cURL vs Postman for the same negative test condition - rest

Question

Correct URI: https://example.com/a/b/users/111/c
Negative test URI: https://example.com/a/b/users/<111>/c
Sample Request Body:
{
"abc": "xyz"
}
Postman returned 404 with a message that the user doesn't exist, for the negative test URI mentioned above.
Then I executed the cURL generated by the Postman and appended to it "-k" to ignore the certificate verification and "-v" for verbosity. However, cURL returned 500 for the same URI.
The original concern was that there has been a mismatch in the test results when the above API was hit by an automation test using RestAssured vs when manually executing it from Postman. Debugging that has led me to find out the difference in response between Postman and curl as well.
Any thoughts to debug this issue further?

Answer 1

While debugging, I found the URI passed was getting encoded and decoded, and <111> got printed as %3C111%3E at one of the breakpoints. So when I tried sending the encoded URI from cURL like https://example.com/a/b/users/%3C111%3E/c it worked just fine returning 404. However Postman returned 404 both with <111> and %3C111%3E.
Thanks to #derpirscher for providing hints that helped me reach this conclusion.
P.S. For more details, please refer my last comment above.