What is jq?
The goal of this blog post is just to make a quick introduction to jq and why you might want to explore it on your own.
jq is an open-source command line tool for interacting with JSON data, you can find the repository here and installations instructions for your system here.
Sometimes you (well, I do) end up in a situation where you wish you could explore and wrangle JSON data on the command line. jq let's you do exactly that and I believe it's a tool worth adding to your proverbial toolbox.
The examples in this blog post might seem contrived, but it is for the benefit of using a JSON API that you can all use without any extra dependencies needed. I hope the examples will make enough sense for you to utilize jq in a more pragmatic manner.
The API I will utilize in this blog post is the https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/ open API.
The Basics
If you feel like you don't often have to query and explore specific parts of a JSON response, then at least the basic identity operator should provide some value.
The identity operator in jq is simply the . character, running the following command highlights and pretty-prints your JSON:
curl -s https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/1 | jq '.'
{
"userId": 1,
"id": 1,
"title": "sunt aut facere repellat provident occaecati excepturi optio reprehenderit",
"body": "quia et suscipit\nsuscipit recusandae consequuntur expedita et cum\nreprehenderit molestiae ut ut quas totam\nnostrum rerum est autem sunt rem eveniet architecto"
}
If you want the value of a specific field, you can use following forms:
curl -s https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/1 | jq '.userId'
1
curl -s https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/1 | jq '.["userId"]'
1
Operating on JSON Arrays
jq also allows you to easily operate on JSON arrays, the simplest case is to just print whatever is at a specified index:
curl -s https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts | jq '.[2]'
{
"userId": 1,
"id": 3,
"title": "ea quasi exercitationem repellat qui ipsa sit aut",
"body": "et iusto sed quo iure\nvoluptatem occaecati omnis eligendi aut ad\nvoluptatem doloribus vel accusantium quis pariatur\nmolestiae porro eius odio et labore et velit aut"
}
You can also return a slice of an array:
curl -s https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts | jq '.[0:2]'
[
{
"userId": 1,
"id": 1,
"title": "sunt aut facere repellat provident occaecati excepturi optio reprehenderit",
"body": "quia et suscipit\nsuscipit recusandae consequuntur expedita et cum\nreprehenderit molestiae ut ut quas totam\nnostrum rerum est autem sunt rem eveniet architecto"
},
{
"userId": 1,
"id": 2,
"title": "qui est esse",
"body": "est rerum tempore vitae\nsequi sint nihil reprehenderit dolor beatae ea dolores neque\nfugiat blanditiis voluptate porro vel nihil molestiae ut reiciendis\nqui aperiam non debitis possimus qui neque nisi nulla"
}
]
Or even the entire array:
curl -s https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts | jq '.[]'
{
"userId": 1,
"id": 1,
"title": "sunt aut facere repellat provident occaecati excepturi optio reprehenderit",
"body": "quia et suscipit\nsuscipit recusandae consequuntur expedita et cum\nreprehenderit molestiae ut ut quas totam\nnostrum rerum est autem sunt rem eveniet architecto"
}
…
{
"userId": 10,
"id": 100,
"title": "at nam consequatur ea labore ea harum",
"body": "cupiditate quo est a modi nesciunt soluta\nipsa voluptas error itaque dicta in\nautem qui minus magnam et distinctio eum\naccusamus ratione error aut"
}
Operator Chaining
Fetching nested properties in jq is simple, you simply access it like you would in for example JavaScript:
curl -s https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts | jq '.[].title'
"sunt aut facere repellat provident occaecati excepturi optio reprehenderit"
"qui est esse"
"ea quasi exercitationem repellat qui ipsa sit aut"
"eum et est occaecati"
…
The above can be accomplished in the following way too:
curl -s https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts | jq '.[] | .title'
As you might expect, the | character in a jq script works similar to how it works in common command line environments. The above script basically reads "for every element in the array, print the title field".
We'll see more examples utilizing piping.
jq Operators and Functions
jq comes with a bunch of built in functions and operators, for example you could make sure the titles of the first three entries end with an exclamation mark using the + operator:
curl -s https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts | jq '.[0:3] | .[].title + "!"'
"sunt aut facere repellat provident occaecati excepturi optio reprehenderit!"
"qui est esse!"
"ea quasi exercitationem repellat qui ipsa sit aut!"
Or you could combine functions, such as selecting all titles of a length greater than 78:
curl -s https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts | jq '.[] | select(.title | length > 78)'
{
"userId": 5,
"id": 50,
"title": "repellendus qui recusandae incidunt voluptates tenetur qui omnis exercitationem",
"body": "error suscipit maxime adipisci consequuntur recusandae\nvoluptas eligendi et est et voluptates\nquia distinctio ab amet quaerat molestiae et vitae\nadipisci impedit sequi nesciunt quis consectetur"
}
The above script combines two functions select and length, the select function which takes a boolean expression and keeps whatever satisfies the constraint; in this case the constraint where the title's length has to be greater than 78.
Combining jq with Other Tools
The true power of command line utilities and tools is the power of chaining them together with the | character. This holds true for jq as well.
Let's say we want to figure out the top 5 most frequent words and the counts of their respective occurences appearing in all the body properties of the posts:
curl -s https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts | jq '[.[].body] | add | split(" ")' | sort | uniq -c | sort | tail -5 | awk '{$1=$1};1' | sed s/"[\",]"/""/g
26 est
39 ut
43 qui
45 aut
84 et
TLDR
jq is great if you ever want to wrangle JSON data in an easy and scriptable way.
Find out more about jq here: https://stedolan.github.io/jq/
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