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I am trying to get the amount of reputation that a user has

how to handle the response (or get one) from a script

You can do this with a Bash command that you can then embed in a script. Here's how:

1. Look up your user ID

Assuming you want to get the reputation on Stack Overflow, go to your account and look up your user ID in the URL:

https://stackoverflow.com/users/123456/your-name

In this example, the ID is 123456.

2. Get user info

Make your first API call with curl:

curl --compressed https://api.stackexchange.com/2.2/users/123456/?site=stackoverflow

This will print a single line of JSON data about you on Stack Overflow, including your reputation.

The --compressed flag makes curl uncompress the response which is compressed using gzip.

We can format the data using jq to make it easier to read:

curl --compressed https://api.stackexchange.com/2.2/users/123456/?site=stackoverflow | jq

Given that you have jq installed, this will produce much nicer output:

{
  "items": [
    {
      "badge_counts": {
        "bronze": 122,
        "silver": 85,
        "gold": 11
      },
      "account_id": 999999,
      "is_employee": false,
      "last_modified_date": 1560547206,
      "last_access_date": 1562693872,
      "reputation_change_year": 2168,
      "reputation_change_quarter": 90,
      "reputation_change_month": 90,
      "reputation_change_week": 30,
      "reputation_change_day": 0,
      "reputation": 15343,
      "creation_date": 1306744511,
      "user_type": "registered",
      "user_id": 123456,
      "accept_rate": 85,
      "location": "Austria",
      "website_url": "https://www.you.com",
      "link": "https://stackoverflow.com/users/123456/your-name",
      "profile_image": "https://i.sstatic.net/SyKPw.jpg?s=128&g=1",
      "display_name": "Your Name"
    }
  ],
  "has_more": false,
  "quota_max": 300,
  "quota_remaining": 268
}

3. Filter the data

Alright, now that we have the data, how do we get at just the user's reputation?

Using jq's filters:

curl --compressed https://api.stackexchange.com/2.2/users/123456/?site=stackoverflow | jq '.items[0].reputation'

This will print the reputation of the user with ID 123456:

15343