website/content/blog/jq.md

title	date	draft	tags	math	medium_enabled
Process JSON in the terminal with jq	2024-10-05T15:59:10-07:00	false		false	false

The jq command is great for quickly viewing and manipulating JSON data. By default, the output is formatted is a human-readable way, and they provide an easy way to "filter" or access elements within the JSON data.

For example

echo "{\"firstName\": \"Brandon\", \"lastName\": \"Rozek\"}"  | jq

Outputs

{
  "firstName": "Brandon",
  "lastName": "Rozek"
}

To see what's in the field firstName

echo "{\"firstName\": \"Brandon\", \"lastName\": \"Rozek\"}"  | jq .firstName

Other than quickly viewing JSON objects in the terminal. I have two other use cases for it.

1: Sanitizing Strings

echo $OUTPUT | jq -Rsa .

Flag	Description
-R	Don´t parse the input as JSON. Instead, each line of text is passed to the filter as a string.
-s	Pass the entire input to the filter as a single long string
-a	Produce pure ASCII output with every non-ASCII character replaced with the equivalent escape sequence.

2: Stringifying JSON

jq ".|tojson"

From the man pages

The tojson and fromjson builtins dump values as JSON texts or parse JSON texts into values, respectively.