CouchDB view throwing invalid UTF-8 JSON error when using key, startkey
CouchDB needs to see the double-quotes.
Bash is probably eating your double quotes before curl runs. Put the URL (double-quotes and all) in single quotes.
curl -X GET 'http://localhost:5984/plots/_design/by_date/_view/by_date?startkey="2010-05-01"'That way, Bash will send the quotes to curl which will send them to CouchDB.
Possibly Firefox or Futon is eating your quotes too. Futon has a gray pointer icon in the upper-right. That links to the raw URL of the view. Try adding the startkey there. You can also input the double-quotes as %22.