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Zq: An easier and faster alternative to jq

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Re: Zq: An easier and faster alternative to jq

#111

Post by avgcorrection »

ethanwillis wrote: post #29
klysm wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't realize jq was missing a maintainer, it's one of my most used CLI tools.

It really is a fundamental problem where lots of these important projects aren't maintained simply because the reality is the maintainers can't beat the economics of a lot of rich freeloaders having no real short term incentive to compensate these maintainers..

> can't beat the economics

This makes it sound like this is some antagonistic relationship where the OSS maintainer loses. But the idealistic scenario that you are alluding to[1] is about a developer who develops free OSS in their free time. And then, yes, very few end up paying or donating anything. But how is a predictable chain of events a loss? What is the “economics” of it?

[1] Some OSS developers do it as their day job.

Re: Zq: An easier and faster alternative to jq

#112

Post by Beltalowda »

laurent123456 wrote: post #103
Beltalowda wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not as arcane as it seems. The issue with jq is that I use it maybe once a month, or even less. The syntax is "arcane enough" that I keep forgetting how to use it because I use it so sporadically. In comparison awk – which I also don't use that often – has a much easier syntax that I can mostly remember. Not entirely convinced by the zq syntax either though; it also seems "arcane enough" that I would keep forg…

I wonder if someone tried to use plain JS as a filtering language? It would be more verbose but it would be easy to remember. For example: [1,2,3] | js "out = 0; for (const n of this) out += n" That would print "6". `out` would be a special variable you write to to print the result, and `this` would be the input.

A few of the tools listed here seem to work like that, or roughly similar: https://ilya-sher.org/2018/04/10/list-of-json-tools-for-comm...

I didn't check any of them out though.

Re: Zq: An easier and faster alternative to jq

#113

Post by mechanicalpulse »

laurent123456 wrote: post #103
Beltalowda wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not as arcane as it seems. The issue with jq is that I use it maybe once a month, or even less. The syntax is "arcane enough" that I keep forgetting how to use it because I use it so sporadically. In comparison awk – which I also don't use that often – has a much easier syntax that I can mostly remember. Not entirely convinced by the zq syntax either though; it also seems "arcane enough" that I would keep forg…

I wonder if someone tried to use plain JS as a filtering language? It would be more verbose but it would be easy to remember. For example: [1,2,3] | js "out = 0; for (const n of this) out += n" That would print "6". `out` would be a special variable you write to to print the result, and `this` would be the input.

I've used trentm's json (formerly known as jsontool) package from npm as my default tool for command-line manipulation of JSON for many years now. It provides CLI arguments for passing JavaScript code for filtering and executing on input. I have resisted investing the time into becoming fluent in jq because I've found that many of the common use cases I have are readily handled by jsontool.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/json

Edit: added more information

Re: Zq: An easier and faster alternative to jq

#114

Post by lilyball »

micimize wrote: post #79

Their syntax comparison under "So you like chocolate or vanilla?" is disingenuous. You can do variable assignment and array expansion in jq: expand_vals_into_independent_records=' .name as $name | .vals[] | { name: $name, val: . } ' echo '{"name":"foo","vals":[1,2,3]} {"name":"bar","vals":[4,5]}' | jq "$expand_vals_into_independent_records" Also, generally, not a fan of the tone of this article.

Your `.name as $name` was my immediate attempt too, but it turns out you can go even simpler with

  jq '{name, val: .vals[]}'

Re: Zq: An easier and faster alternative to jq

#115

Post by [deleted] »

psacawa wrote: post #6

Since no one seems to know about it, jq is described in great detail on the github wiki page [0]. That flattens the learning curve a lot. It's not as arcane as it seems. The touted claim that is fundamentally stateless is not true. jq is also stateful in the sense that it has variables. If you want, you can write regular procedural code this way. Some examples [1] The real problem of jq is that it is currently lackin…

[deleted]

Re: Zq: An easier and faster alternative to jq

#116

Post by [deleted] »

knome wrote: post #20

These guys must really hate functional programming. I can see where jq might confuse someone new to it, but their replacement is irregular, stateful, still difficult, and I don't even see variable binding or anything. jq requires you to understand that `hello|world` will run world for each hello, passing the world out values to either the next piped expression, the wrapping value-collecting list, or printing them to…

[deleted]

Re: Zq: An easier and faster alternative to jq

#117

Post by [deleted] »

brushfoot wrote: post #5

The name of its corporate progenitor may leave a bad taste in some mouths, but I highly recommend PowerShell for this sort of thing. It's cross platform, MIT licensed, and comes with excellent JSON parsing and querying capabilities. Reading, parsing, and querying JSON to return all red cars: Get-Content cars.json | ConvertFrom-Json | ? { $_.color -eq 'red' } The beauty of this is that the query syntax applies not jus…

[deleted]

Re: Zq: An easier and faster alternative to jq

#118

Post by jodrellblank »

mschuster91 wrote: post #33
brushfoot wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me a telemetry opt-out is a small price to pay for what PowerShell brings to the table, but to each their own. > There might be other components, now or in the future, that also send data to Microsoft Of course. Do your due diligence on whatever you install. No tool should be exempt from that.

> Do your due diligence on whatever you install. No tool should be exempt from that. That's a ridiculous take. 99% of users don't understand what all that technobabble in a typical EULA means, they will just go for the option they are nudged to (which is why first the courts and now enforcement agencies are stepping up their game against that practice [1]). The way that the GDPR expects stuff to be handled is by gett…

The GDPR applies to personal data. PowerShell telemetry isn't personal data, so it's not covered by the GDPR. What is reported is documented here:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft...

and is "anonymized information about the host running PowerShell, and information about how PowerShell is used". It sucks that it has telemetry, but anonymised information about whether a computer ran 10 .exe or 10 cmdlets pales into insignificance against Windows and Edge and OneDrive slurping up names, addresses, files, moving logins to Microsoft accounts, sending browser history to Microsoft, checking downloads with Microsoft, keeping a history of all programs run in Windows for timeline and trying to send that to Microsoft to sync it between devices, moving OneNote to the cloud, having the start menu search be a Bing web search, defaulting to Cortana being a cloud based voice search, sending pen and ink data to Microsoft, and etc. etc.

Re: Zq: An easier and faster alternative to jq

#119

Post by sandyarmstrong »

ptx wrote: post #18
brushfoot wrote: post #5

The name of its corporate progenitor may leave a bad taste in some mouths, but I highly recommend PowerShell for this sort of thing. It's cross platform, MIT licensed, and comes with excellent JSON parsing and querying capabilities. Reading, parsing, and querying JSON to return all red cars: Get-Content cars.json | ConvertFrom-Json | ? { $_.color -eq 'red' } The beauty of this is that the query syntax applies not jus…

PowerShell "sends basic telemetry data to Microsoft [...] about the host running PowerShell, and information about how PowerShell is used" [1]. And since it relies on .NET, that also requires its own separate opt-out for its telemetry. There might be other components, now or in the future, that also send data to Microsoft by default and would have to be separately discovered and disabled. [1] https://docs.microsoft.c…

> And since it relies on .NET, that also requires its own separate opt-out for its telemetry.

Building a program with .NET does NOT cause that program to send telemetry to Microsoft.

You're thinking of the .NET SDK itself. Using PowerShell does not trigger any use of the .NET SDK.

Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft.

Re: Zq: An easier and faster alternative to jq

#120

Post by sandyarmstrong »

majkinetor wrote: post #93
brushfoot wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear that, I use and like *nix too. PowerShell aliases help a lot. It comes with some predefined, like `gc` for `Get-Content`. The above example could be rewritten: gc cars.json | ConvertFrom-Json | ? color -eq 'red' `ConvertFrom-Json` doesn't have a default alias, but you can define one in your PowerShell profile. I do that for commands I find myself using frequently. Say we pick convjson: gc cars.json | convjson…

You don't need $_ for immediate properties which looks much cleaner: gc cars.json | convjson | ? color -eq 'red'

TIL! Thanks!
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