(except I have it aliased to "jq-structure" locally of course. also, if there's a new fancy way to do this, I'm all ears; I've been using this alias for like... almost a decade now :/)
In the spirit of trying out jqfmt, let's see how it formats that one-liner...
Not bad! Shame that jqfmt doesn't output a newline at the end, though. The errant `%` is zsh's partial line marker. Also, `-ob -ar -op pipe` seems like a pretty good set of defaults to me - I would prefer that over it (seemingly?) not doing anything with no flags. (At least for this sample snippet.)
naniwaduni · 35m ago
For small problem sizes, you can get a nontrivial improvement by moving the unique up ahead of all the string manipulation:
jq -r '[path(..)|map(if type=="number" then "[]" end)]|unique[]|join(".")/".[]"|"."+join("[]")'
For larger problem sizes, you might enjoy this approach to avoid generating the array of all paths as an intermediate, instead producing a deduped shadow structure as you go along:
jq -rn --stream 'reduce (inputs|select(.[1])[0]|map(if type=="number" then "[]" end)) as $_ (.; setpath($_; 1))|path(..)|join(".")/".[]"|"."+join("[]")'
crashabr · 47m ago
I'm a long time user of this snippet as well. I discovered fastgron [0] last year and found it convenient for some situations!
Not anywhere near as sophisticated as yours but I have something vaguely similar for simplifying JSON documents (while maintaining what the data also looks like) for feeding to LLMs to help them code against:
jq 'walk(if type == "array" then (if length > 0 then [.[0]] else . end) else . end)'
So that 70,000+ line Amazon example of yours would boil down to:
.. which is easier/cheaper to feed to an LLM for getting it to write code to process, etc. than the multi-megabyte original.
rwiggins · 2h ago
Oh wow, that's fantastic. I love that it includes real values while still summarizing the doc's structure. I'm going to steal that. I'll probably keep jq-structure around because it's so easy to copy/paste paths I'm looking for, but yours is definitely better for understanding what the JSON doc actually contains.
jzelinskie · 3h ago
This is an incredibly useful one-liner. Thank you for sharing!
I'm a big fan of jq, having written my own jq wrapper that supports multiple formats (github.com/jzelinskie/faq), but these days I find myself more quickly reaching for Python when I get any amount of complexity. Being able to use uv scripts in Python has considerably lowered the bar for me to use it for scripting.
Where are you drawing the line?
dotancohen · 9m ago
I could Google it, but tell a bit more about uv scripts. Isn't uv a package manager like pip?
rwiggins · 2h ago
Hmm. I stick to jq for basically any JSON -> JSON transformation or summarization (field extraction, renaming, etc.). Perhaps I should switch to scripts more. uv is... such a game changer for Python, I don't think I've internalized it yet!
But as an example of about where I'd stop using jq/shell scripting and switch to an actual program... we have a service that has task queues. The number of queues for an endpoint is variable, but enumerable via `GET /queues` (I'm simplifying here of course), which returns e.g. `[0, 1, 2]`. There was a bug where certain tasks would get stuck in a non-terminal state, blocking one of those queues. So, I wanted a simple little snippet to find, for each queue, (1) which task is currently executing and (2) how many tasks are enqueued. It ended up vaguely looking like:
I think this is roughly where I'd start to consider "hmm, maybe a proper script would do this better". I bet the equivalent Python is much easier to read and probably not much longer.
Although, I think this example demonstrates how I typically use jq, which is like a little multitool. I don't usually write really complicated jq.
Bluestein · 3h ago
May I also add this ain't a mere one liner. It's a masterclass!
jdc0589 · 2h ago
this is a super useful oneliner, immediately saved to my bash profile as `jqstructure`
Hendrikto · 3h ago
> Side note: Ever tried Googling for "jq formatter"? Reading search results is a nightmare since jq itself is, among other things, a formatter.
That’s what I thought too, when I read the title. To clarify: This tool formats jq commands, not JSON itself.
vanschelven · 3h ago
Which makes sense because jq, with no options, acts as a formatter by default. (it's about 50% of my jq usage).
layer8 · 3h ago
While it doesn’t help much for search in this case, the more specific term is “pretty-printer”.
s17n · 1h ago
If you need to format your one-liner, maybe it shouldn't be a one liner?
Anyway whether or not this tool is advisable its definitely cool, nice work!
noperator · 24m ago
My prototype one-liners usually turn into Go programs :)
Bluestein · 5m ago
Sic semper :)
Bluestein · 1h ago
> If you need to format your one-liner, maybe it shouldn't be a one liner?
Entirely correct, this point.-
PS. May I also appreciate your comment, as far as form? You made both, valid, points.-
kiitos · 2h ago
Instead of making users enable every formatting rule explicitly e.g.
jqfmt -ob -ar -op pipe
It would be better if the tool enabled a common set of rules by default, so that `echo ... | jqfmt` actually did something useful :)
mikeocool · 1h ago
Been using fx (fx.wtf) as alternative to jq recently.
Give you a nice javascript interface to do similar types of processing to what I would do with jq.
God I really abhor jq and it seems it's becoming a standard. I dislike it cause I'm too dumb to correctly dredge up it's incantations, and once a year I have to go reading their arcane docs. I suppose it's another fertile ground for LLM use.
mdaniel · 2h ago
The bad news is that much like how "I'm just going to DSL this ..." inevitably morphs into a full-blown programming language[1], so too is the ubiquitous "gah, your language is too complex, I'm going to just use this other tool that implements my favorite 10% of the cases"
which is a long way of saying: or else what? There's 100% no way that I'm going to ever, ever use <<python3 -c "import json, sys; print(json.load(sys.stdin)[...ohgawd...]">> and if you are, then more power to ya and jq apparently doesn't solve a problem you have
What would "non-arcane" jq docs look like? I'm kind of in the same boat, being an infrequent jq user, but I've generally found the docs pretty easy to navigate.
ashwinsundar · 57m ago
A standard for what? It just makes JSON look nicer and more query-able. You don't have to use it.
xmonkee · 20m ago
A standard as in there is a cottage industry of tools and websites built around it now, like this one.
guerrilla · 2h ago
I thought this title was rot13 at first. :D
Bluestein · 2h ago
Gubhtug V jnf gur bayl bar :)
PS. Honestly, it's pretty close.-
noperator · 2h ago
Hey, author here. see also, sol: a de-minifier (formatter, exploder, beautifier) for shell one-liners
I'll use this opportunity to plug the one-liner I use all the time, which summarizes the "structure" of a doc in a jq-able way: https://github.com/stedolan/jq/issues/243#issuecomment-48470... (I didn't write it, I'm just a happy user)
For example:
(except I have it aliased to "jq-structure" locally of course. also, if there's a new fancy way to do this, I'm all ears; I've been using this alias for like... almost a decade now :/)In the spirit of trying out jqfmt, let's see how it formats that one-liner...
Not bad! Shame that jqfmt doesn't output a newline at the end, though. The errant `%` is zsh's partial line marker. Also, `-ob -ar -op pipe` seems like a pretty good set of defaults to me - I would prefer that over it (seemingly?) not doing anything with no flags. (At least for this sample snippet.)[0] https://github.com/adamritter/fastgron
I'm a big fan of jq, having written my own jq wrapper that supports multiple formats (github.com/jzelinskie/faq), but these days I find myself more quickly reaching for Python when I get any amount of complexity. Being able to use uv scripts in Python has considerably lowered the bar for me to use it for scripting.
Where are you drawing the line?
But as an example of about where I'd stop using jq/shell scripting and switch to an actual program... we have a service that has task queues. The number of queues for an endpoint is variable, but enumerable via `GET /queues` (I'm simplifying here of course), which returns e.g. `[0, 1, 2]`. There was a bug where certain tasks would get stuck in a non-terminal state, blocking one of those queues. So, I wanted a simple little snippet to find, for each queue, (1) which task is currently executing and (2) how many tasks are enqueued. It ended up vaguely looking like:
which ends up producing output like (assuming queue 0 was blocked) I think this is roughly where I'd start to consider "hmm, maybe a proper script would do this better". I bet the equivalent Python is much easier to read and probably not much longer.Although, I think this example demonstrates how I typically use jq, which is like a little multitool. I don't usually write really complicated jq.
That’s what I thought too, when I read the title. To clarify: This tool formats jq commands, not JSON itself.
Anyway whether or not this tool is advisable its definitely cool, nice work!
Entirely correct, this point.-
PS. May I also appreciate your comment, as far as form? You made both, valid, points.-
Give you a nice javascript interface to do similar types of processing to what I would do with jq.
which is a long way of saying: or else what? There's 100% no way that I'm going to ever, ever use <<python3 -c "import json, sys; print(json.load(sys.stdin)[...ohgawd...]">> and if you are, then more power to ya and jq apparently doesn't solve a problem you have
1: https://www.laws-of-software.com/laws/zawinski/
PS. Honestly, it's pretty close.-
https://github.com/noperator/sol
I actually wrote jqfmt because I needed it for sol :)