2d ago

Mastering jq

Mastering JQ: Part 1

12 comments

I don't know if we should call someone a master of jq if they do
echo '{"k1": [{"k2": [9]}]}' | jq '.k1 | .[0] | .k2 | .[0]'
Instead of just
echo '{"k1": [{"k2": [9]}]}' | jq '.k1[0].k2[0]'
- Both are bad. Make it readable.
  And if you often resort to jq, better use python or at least something like nushell.
The first step to mastery is RTFM: https://jqlang.org/manual/
- oh hey, a project that actually has a manual to read
  
  https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.html#Undocumented
If you're going to use jq to manipulate JSON I'd recommend a helper CLI tool like ijq. It allows you to experiment without needing too lines in your terminal history.
I’m curious if anyone else has considered using nushell for these things? Probably not for everything (or to replace one’s shell) but it definitely is simpler for basic tasks.
- That's the primary value offer of nushell so at least people who made it considered it I'd say.
I asked an LLM to write a jq scriptlet for me today. It wasn't even complicated, it just beat working it out/trying to craft the write string to search Stackoverflow for.
- I tried and failed to get an LLM to write jq code to do a regex based matcher for finding if one json object was a subset of another.
  Gave up and learned it enough to get it going. jq is nutso powerful.
  
  I don't understand how regex comes into it? Sounds tricky though!

12 comments