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2021-08-04 - an intro to jq

i heard about the jq command sometime last year and i've had it installed for many months now, but i didn't need to use it until today.

jq on github

installation with pacman is straightforward:

sudo pacman -S jq

i'm guessing jq stands for "json query", but i couldn't find a source for that to know for sure. some nice things that i noticed immediately when i started using jq are:

syntax highlighting
pretty prints json (like `python -m json.tool`)
great documentation

one of the main reasons to use jq is for json filtering. Here are some simple examples:

json='{"a": {"b": ["c", "d", {"e": "f"}]}}'

echo $json | jq .         # prints: {"a": {"b": ["c", "d", {"e": "f"}]}}
echo $json | jq .a        # prints: {"b": ["c", "d", {"e": "f"}]}
echo $json | jq .a.b[0]   # prints: "c"
echo $json | jq .a.b[2].e # prints: "f"