jq is a cool tool

jq is pretty cool. It’s a command-line utility that interacts with JSON.

I only recently discovered that it does loads more than just pretty-printing JSON.

You can map over it and do really quite complex data processing with jq.

I recently had to extract some data from an API and ended up piping into this:

jq '.Chart.Purchases | map((. | first | tostring) + ", " + (. | last  | tostring) )'

It’s really flexible and nice to use!

I’d recommend people have a quick browse through the jq examples and tutorial just so they know the full extent of what jq can do.