Hfrhyu

I'm very new to OpenStreetMap's Overpass QL API. After digging through its hefty wiki and several tutorials I get the feeling that if I want to query for a city I can use either area[name="Tbilisi"][boundary=administrative] or geocodeArea:Tbilisi. I think [boundary=administrative] helps identify it as a city or at least some kind of official entity like a state or municipality rather than, say, part of the name of a cafe. I don't know if I am right.

Following that, I should be able to get restaurants in Tbilisi with the area[name="Tbilisi"][boundary=administrative] syntax on Overpass Turbo like so:

area[name="Tbilisi"][boundary=administrative]->.searchArea;
node["amenity"="restaurant"](area.searchArea);
out;

However, it returns '"elements": []'. out count returns a total of 0.

I then tried with geocodeArea:Tbilisi:

geocodeArea:Tbilisi->.searchArea;
node["amenity"="restaurant"](area.searchArea);
out;

This returned a very long list of elements, out count total is 419.

Unfortunately, I can't use geocodeArea:Tbilisi with cURL like this:

curl --globoff 'https://overpass-api.de/api/interpreter?data=[out:json];geocodeArea:Tbilisi->.searchArea;node["amenity"="restaurant"](area.searchArea);out;'

It gives:

...
<p><strong style="color:#FF0000">Error</strong>: line 1: parse error: Unknown type "{" </p>
<p><strong style="color:#FF0000">Error</strong>: line 1: parse error: An empty query is not allowed </p>
<p><strong style="color:#FF0000">Error</strong>: line 1: parse error: ';' expected - '{' found. </p>

(Update 8 Apr 19: As mmd mentions in the comments below, geocodeArea:CITY_NAME is Overpass Turbo syntactic sugar and cannot be used for Overpass API.) Looking into the Network tab of dev tools after running this same query in Overpass Turbo, I find this works on Overpass Turbo because it translates geocodeArea:Tbilisi to area(3601996871). But I'd like to query by city name if possible.

I don't know if I've misunderstood the query structure. If I try the area[name="CITY_NAME"] syntax with Singapore like so:

[out:json];
area[name="Singapore"][boundary=administrative]->.searchArea;
node["amenity"="restaurant"](area.searchArea);
out count;

Overpass Turbo returns a total of 2221.

But with the geocodeArea:CITY_NAME syntax like this:

[out:json];
geocodeArea:Singapore->.searchArea;
node["amenity"="restaurant"](area.searchArea);
out count;

The total count is different. It's 2192.

What is the correct way to query for POI in a city? Preferably with cURL and by city name?