If not told otherwise, curl writes the received data to stdout. It can be instructed to instead save that data into a local file, using the --output or --remote-name options. If curl is given multiple URLs to transfer on the command line, it similarly needs multiple options for where to save them.
curl does not parse or otherwise “understand” the content it gets or writes as output. It does no encoding or decoding, unless explicitly asked to with dedicated command line options.