Curl will now output JSON

#1

Post by logicalstack » Tue, Mar 17, 2020, 6:07 PM UTC

Curl will now output JSON
daniel.haxx.se

Re: Curl will now output JSON

#2

Post by dTal » Tue, Mar 17, 2020, 6:56 PM UTC

I think if all command line tools outputted JSON, it would go a long way towards fixing the "ad-hoc parser problem" in scripts, and bring unixy shells around to a more PowerShell-like object-passing style. Passing plain text around is a great idea, but It's silly to restrict yourself to a single structural unit within that text (the "line"). We have better tech now.

Re: Curl will now output JSON

#3

Post by majkinetor » Tue, Mar 17, 2020, 7:31 PM UTC

dTal wrote: post #2

I think if all command line tools outputted JSON, it would go a long way towards fixing the "ad-hoc parser problem" in scripts, and bring unixy shells around to a more PowerShell-like object-passing style. Passing plain text around is a great idea, but It's silly to restrict yourself to a single structural unit within that text (the "line"). We have better tech now.

While powershell is a lot more then passing hashtable around, it would make a first good step. Accepting json object as parameter in "unix standard" should be done along.

Re: Curl will now output JSON

#4

Post by banger180 » Tue, Mar 17, 2020, 8:30 PM UTC

dTal wrote: post #2

I think if all command line tools outputted JSON, it would go a long way towards fixing the "ad-hoc parser problem" in scripts, and bring unixy shells around to a more PowerShell-like object-passing style. Passing plain text around is a great idea, but It's silly to restrict yourself to a single structural unit within that text (the "line"). We have better tech now.

Yep this would be really great.

Re: Curl will now output JSON

#5

Post by ayyess » Tue, Mar 17, 2020, 8:52 PM UTC

dTal wrote: post #2

I think if all command line tools outputted JSON, it would go a long way towards fixing the "ad-hoc parser problem" in scripts, and bring unixy shells around to a more PowerShell-like object-passing style. Passing plain text around is a great idea, but It's silly to restrict yourself to a single structural unit within that text (the "line"). We have better tech now.

Have you seen jc[0] as an effort to wrap common utilities to output json?

[0]: https://github.com/kellyjonbrazil/jc

Re: Curl will now output JSON

#6

Post by pyuser583 » Tue, Mar 17, 2020, 9:10 PM UTC

That’s nice.

Re: Curl will now output JSON

#7

Post by nyberg » Tue, Mar 17, 2020, 9:35 PM UTC

dTal wrote: post #2

I think if all command line tools outputted JSON, it would go a long way towards fixing the "ad-hoc parser problem" in scripts, and bring unixy shells around to a more PowerShell-like object-passing style. Passing plain text around is a great idea, but It's silly to restrict yourself to a single structural unit within that text (the "line"). We have better tech now.

It's nice but I don't think json is such a great format for it. The overhead of parsing it is incredibly annoying along with being unable to pack binary data which is what unix tools can deal with to some extent

Re: Curl will now output JSON

#8

Post by MuffinFlavored » Tue, Mar 17, 2020, 9:57 PM UTC

Do you still need to pass it to `jq` for it to be pretty printed or no, I couldn't tell from reading the article?

Re: Curl will now output JSON

#9

Post by kuesji » Tue, Mar 17, 2020, 10:05 PM UTC

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #8

Do you still need to pass it to `jq` for it to be pretty printed or no, I couldn't tell from reading the article?

yes, you still need 'jq' for pretty print.

Re: Curl will now output JSON

#10

Post by Arnavion » Tue, Mar 17, 2020, 10:22 PM UTC

dTal wrote: post #2

I think if all command line tools outputted JSON, it would go a long way towards fixing the "ad-hoc parser problem" in scripts, and bring unixy shells around to a more PowerShell-like object-passing style. Passing plain text around is a great idea, but It's silly to restrict yourself to a single structural unit within that text (the "line"). We have better tech now.

libxo is doing a good job for FreeBSD. It would be nice if Linux also adapts that, or something similar, one day.

Eg I have a script that needs output from netstat, and `netstat -bin --libxo json | jq ...` is a great way to get that info instead of scraping the human-readable output.