Simple json tasks .... read from, write to, read a value and save it as a variable in BASH .... where are those examples?
The question for is this; can I do with json files what i can do with Python using Zq?
Zq: An easier and faster alternative to jq
21–30 of 237 posts
Re: Zq: An easier and faster alternative to jq
#22Pardon my ignorance, but would I spend time learning something like jq or zq when it only takes me a couple of minutes to develop a script using some high-level language? I've had to process complex JSON files in the past, and a simple Python script gets the job done, and the syntax is much more familiar and easier to memorize. Is there a use case I'm missing?
Re: Zq: An easier and faster alternative to jq
#23The 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…
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.
Re: Zq: An easier and faster alternative to jq
#24I don't get it. "Instead of learning jq DSL, learn zq DSL". To me they look similarly complicated and the examples stresses certain aggregation operations that are harder to do in jq (due to it being stateless).
Yes, but fortunately, your efforts will pay dividends when parsing all the 'z*' boutique formats that it supports, zson, zst, zng, the list goes on. /s
Re: Zq: An easier and faster alternative to jq
#25Since 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…
I didn't realize jq was missing a maintainer, it's one of my most used CLI tools.
Re: Zq: An easier and faster alternative to jq
#26Pardon my ignorance, but would I spend time learning something like jq or zq when it only takes me a couple of minutes to develop a script using some high-level language? I've had to process complex JSON files in the past, and a simple Python script gets the job done, and the syntax is much more familiar and easier to memorize. Is there a use case I'm missing?
If you're doing a lot of JSON munging every day and have good mastery of something like jq or zq, you can probably get things done faster.
Like you, I almost always just write Python scripts for such tasks because it's a lot easier for me to reason through it and debug it, but it's definitely slower-going than what I might do if I were very adept in a terse language like jq. I don't do this too often, so it makes little difference to me, but if someone is doing this multiple times a day, every day, it'll add up. As you say, it takes a few minutes; with jq, it could be a few seconds.
Re: Zq: An easier and faster alternative to jq
#27Pardon my ignorance, but would I spend time learning something like jq or zq when it only takes me a couple of minutes to develop a script using some high-level language? I've had to process complex JSON files in the past, and a simple Python script gets the job done, and the syntax is much more familiar and easier to memorize. Is there a use case I'm missing?
Honestly, I've only really used `jq` to quickly parse JSON structures in interactive sessions e.g
curl -s http://foo.bar | jq .some.nested.value
Re: Zq: An easier and faster alternative to jq
#28As an aside --- isn't the traditional flat namespace of unix command names getting a bit crowded nowadays?
Re: Zq: An easier and faster alternative to jq
#29Since 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…
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..
Re: Zq: An easier and faster alternative to jq
#30Pardon my ignorance, but would I spend time learning something like jq or zq when it only takes me a couple of minutes to develop a script using some high-level language? I've had to process complex JSON files in the past, and a simple Python script gets the job done, and the syntax is much more familiar and easier to memorize. Is there a use case I'm missing?
I am also on the same side of the discussion, but I'm a programmer by trade. Most of the cases I've seen non trivial jq uses is by people doing command line or shell script magic. In this context I guess it's easier to write the jq expression language than to whip up a fully fledged Python/Ruby/Perl script without having to debug pretty basic stuff once you know the syntax. Pretty much like awk.