Use jq to query and manipulate JSON data

jq is a lightweight command-line tool to quickly process your JSON data. I mainly use it to search (grep) and select specific fields of a JSON file, but it can also be used to transform (sed) and process (awk) the data. Of course, the output is also nicely formatted.

If this peaks your interest head over to the download page.

 data.json content_paste
{
  "persons": [
    {
      "id": 1,
      "name": "Bob"
    },
    {
      "id": 2,
      "name": "Alice"
    }
  ],
  "lastModified": "2023-11-26"
}

 content_paste
jq .lastModified data.json
 
> "2023-11-26"

 content_paste
jq .persons[1]
> {
    "id": 2,
    "name": "Alice"
  }

 content_paste
jq .persons.[].name data.json
 
> "Bob"
> "Alice"

 content_paste
jq .persons[0].id, .lastModified data.json
 
> 1
> "2023-11-26"

While these examples are simple and are using a local data source, you can feed data to jq using the pipe (|) operator.

 content_paste
curl 'https://api.github.com/repos/jqlang/jq/commits?per_page=5' | jq '.'

Make sure to check out the tutorial and the playground to also learn how to fully take advantage of jq by transforming and filtering JSON data.

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