Jq Usage

Internal

• jq
• jq Concepts

Command Line Options

-r

Output raw strings, not JSON content. This is very useful when jq is used as part of shell pipelines and the results feed other shell commands.

Universal Filters

select() Filter

select(boolean-expression)

The select() filter lets its input pass through unchanged if the boolean expression evaluates to true, and produces no output (swallows the input) otherwise.

For more details about expressions, see:

jq Concepts - Expressions

Example:

jq '... | select(.Name == "something")'

.Name extracts the value of a map key value pair whose key is "Name".

Map Filters

Object Identifier-Index Filter .key

.key

The filter expects a map and produces the value associated with the key given as argument of the filter, or null if there is no such object. The value, if exists, can be a primitive, a map or an array.

The key is case sensitive.

cat example.json | jq '.color'

This syntax only works for "identifier-like" keys: keys that are all made of alphanumeric characters and underscore, and which do not start with a digit.

The .key syntax is actually an alias for the more generic syntax:

.["key"]

If the key contains special characters, the .key alias cannot be used, and the complete .["key"] syntax should be used:

jq '.["complex::key"]'

For:

{
  "complex::color": "something"
}

jq '.complex::color'

will fail:

jq: error: syntax error, unexpected ':', expecting $end (Unix shell quoting issues?) at <top-level>, line 1:
.complex::color

while

jq '.["complex::color"]' 

will work.

Array Filters

Array Index Filter .[index]

.[zero-based-index]

selects the corresponding array element, or null if the index does not designate an element that exists.

For:

[
  "blue",
  "red",
  "green"
]

jq '.[0]'

return "blue"

while

jq '.[5]'

returns null.

If the input is not an array, the filter fails:

echo \"blah\" | jq '.[]'
jq: error (at <stdin>:1): Cannot iterate over string ("blah")

Array-to-Iterator Filter []

The filter expects and array and produces the array's elements as an iteration.

echo "[\"red\", \"blue\"]" | jq '.[]'

has the same result as:

echo "\"red\"" "\"blue\"" | jq '.'

Interestingly enough, and somewhat counterintuitively, the filter also works on maps. The effect is equivalent with Java's Map#values().

echo "{\"a\": 1, \"b\": 2}" | jq '.[]'

produces:

1 
2

The filter does not work on primitives:

echo \"blah\" | jq '.[]'
jq: error (at <stdin>:1): Cannot iterate over string ("blah")