Getting junk value in kafka res api response - apache-kafka

Question

I am using rest api to get the topic if from the kafka instance on confluent cloud
I am using below curl command
curl "http://(myhost):9092/topics/(topicname)" --output op.txt
but I am getting junk value in op.txt like
"U^C^C^#^B^BP"
Is there any solution to this?

Answer 1

You can't use REST to consume from Confluent Cloud (yet). With your data in Confluent Cloud you can use tools like ccloud or kafkacat to access your data from the commandline.
Confluent Cloud CLI (ccloud)
$ ccloud kafka topic consume --from-beginning rmoff_test_topic_01
Starting Kafka Consumer. ^C or ^D to exit
Hello world!
This is a message on a topic in Confluent Cloud
kafkacat
You can run kafkacat locally, or use it from Docker.
docker run --rm --interactive edenhill/kafkacat:1.6.0 \
-X security.protocol=SASL_SSL -X sasl.mechanisms=PLAIN \
-X ssl.ca.location=./etc/ssl/cert.pem -X api.version.request=true \
-b $CCLOUD_BROKER_HOST \
-X sasl.username="$CCLOUD_API_KEY" \
-X sasl.password="$CCLOUD_API_SECRET" \
-t rmoff_test_topic_01 -C -u -e
Hello world!
This is a message on a topic in Confluent Cloud
You can also output the message in JSON which can be useful:
docker run --rm --interactive edenhill/kafkacat:1.6.0 \
-X security.protocol=SASL_SSL -X sasl.mechanisms=PLAIN \
-X ssl.ca.location=./etc/ssl/cert.pem -X api.version.request=true \
-b $CCLOUD_BROKER_HOST \
-X sasl.username="$CCLOUD_API_KEY" \
-X sasl.password="$CCLOUD_API_SECRET" \
-t rmoff_test_topic_01 -C -u -J -e
{
"topic": "rmoff_test_topic_01",
"partition": 0,
"offset": 0,
"tstype": "create",
"ts": 1604571163960,
"broker": 7,
"key": null,
"payload": "Hello world!"
}
{
"topic": "rmoff_test_topic_01",
"partition": 3,
"offset": 0,
"tstype": "create",
"ts": 1604571168723,
"broker": 1,
"key": null,
"payload": "This is a message on a topic in Confluent Cloud"
}