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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

#41

Post by ilyash »

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…

.. or you can try Next Generation Shell (author here):

fetch("cars.json").filter({"color": "red"})

# or

echo(fetch("cars.json").filter({"color": "red"}))

Re: Zq: An easier and faster alternative to jq

#42

Post by johnday »

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…

No kidding!

This part in particular jumped out at me:

> To work around this statelessness, you can wrap a sequence of independent values into an array, iterate over the array, then wrap that result back up into another array so you can pass the entire sequence as a single value downstream to the “next filter”.

This is literally just describing a map. A technique so generally applicable and useful that it's made its way into every modern imperative/procedural programming language I can think of. The idea that this person fails to recognise such a common multiparadigmatic programming idiom doesn't fill me with confidence about the design of zq.

Re: Zq: An easier and faster alternative to jq

#44

Post by aftbit »

diehunde wrote: post #22

Pardon 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?

This is how I felt about regular expression when I was first learning them. Now I feel that they're one of the most powerful text-processing tools that I know. I also felt similarly about SQL at the very beginning. IMO if you find yourself doing a _lot_ of JSON processing, learning at least basic jq gives you superpowers.

Re: Zq: An easier and faster alternative to jq

#45

Post by jdnier »

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…

Here's podcast interview with the creator of jq about what he's been working on at Jane Street: https://signalsandthreads.com/memory-management/

Re: Zq: An easier and faster alternative to jq

#47

Post by zikduruqe »

kitd wrote: post #39
weinzierl wrote: post #12

jq is incredibly powerful and I'm using it more and more. Even better, there is a whole ecosystem of tools that are similar or work in conjunction with jq: * jq (a great JSON-wrangling tool) * jc (convert various tools’ output into JSON) * jo (create JSON objects) * yq (like jq, but for YAML) * fq (like jq, but for binary) * htmlq (like jq, but for HTML) List shamelessly stolen from Julia Evans[1]. For live links see…

Also highly recommended is gron [0], to make json easily searchable [0] https://github.com/TomNomNom/gron

I came here looking for a gron recommendation. I use this very often.

Re: Zq: An easier and faster alternative to jq

#48

Post by mschuster91 »

ElectricalUnion wrote: post #40
mschuster91 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> What I would actually expect of Microsoft is to follow the Apple way: have one single central place, ideally at setup and later in the System Preferences, where tracking, analytics and other optional crap can be disabled system-wide. This is still GDPR non-compliant, you should have a central place to _opt-in_ tracking, analytics and other optional crap if you so desire.

So what? You can opt-in to tracking in the macOS System Preferences, pane "security and data protection", tab "Privacy" at any time you wish should you not have done so during the macOS onboarding process.

In Debian, you can opt-in at setup time or any later time with a simple "dpkg-reconfigure popularity-contest" (even though that one isn't fully GDPR-compliant as you can't easily read what exactly is being done from the same screen).

Re: Zq: An easier and faster alternative to jq

#49

Post by lenkite »

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..

Pity he quit before Github opened up sponsorships.

Re: Zq: An easier and faster alternative to jq

#50

Post by gcmeplz »

I like using `jq` to create line-delimited JSON and then using a language I know well (Node) to process it after that point. I find `jq '.[] | select(.location=="Stockholm")'` less readable than something like `nq --filter '({location}) => location === "Stockholm"'` because I'm much more used to Node syntax.

- https://github.com/thisredone/rb is a widely used ruby version of this idea

- https://github.com/KelWill/nq#readme is something similar that I wrote for my own use

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