jq is a lightweight and flexible command-line JSON processor. A jq program is a “filter”: it takes an input, and produces an output. There are a lot of builtin filters for extracting a particular field of an object, or converting a number to a string, or various other standard tasks.
Filters can be combined in various ways – you can pipe the output of one filter into another filter, or collect the output of a filter into an array.
Some filters produce multiple results, for instance there’s one that produces all the elements of its input array. Piping that filter into a second runs the second filter for each element of the array. Generally, things that would be done with loops and iteration in other languages are just done by gluing filters together in jq.
jq is like sed for JSON data – you can use it to slice and filter and map and transform structured data with the same ease that sed, awk, grep and friends let you play with text.
jq can mangle the data format that you have into the one that you want with very little effort, and the program to do so is often shorter and simpler than you’d expect.
The input to jq is parsed as a sequence of whitespace-separated JSON values which are passed through the provided filter one at a time. The output(s) of the filter are written to standard out, again as a sequence of whitespace-separated JSON data.
Website: stedolan.github.io/jq
Support: Manual, GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Stephen Dolan
License: MIT License
jq is written in C. Learn C with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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