>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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bash_(Unix_shell)) 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](https://curl.haxx.se/):

    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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gzip).

We can format the data with [`jq`](https://stedolan.github.io/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