JSON Spells

JQ Command Line JSON Parser

https://stedolan.github.io/jq/

Extract specific field from JSON Array of Dicts

jq ".ArrayKey[].SpecificFieldInDict"

Print strings without quotes

jq --raw-output ".id"

Make each JSON object only take up 1 line

# Quickly count how many objects there are
jq ".events[].message" --compact-output | wc -l

Get a range of a JSON array

jq ".events[0:6]"

Extract set of fields from larger dict

jq '{desiredName: .fieldName, otherField: .arrayField[0].field, etc: .otherField}'

# Real world example extracting video properties from larger JSON dict
# the -s directive tells JQ to treat jsonlines format as if it were a JSON array
cat movie_list.json | jq -c '{filename: .format.filename, width: .streams[0].width, height: .streams[0].height}' | jq -s 'sort_by(.height)' > resolution_sorted_movie_list.json