[gray_-_wolf]

One huge advantage of JQ is that it often is installed. I have jq in our Jenkins image, but I do not have this tool. The syntax is bit arcane, but once you invest bit of time into learning it, it starts to make sense (to a degree). It is a reasonable language for a stream processing.

[ramses0]

There's a few jq patterns I've adopted:

   echo "$SOME_JSON" | jq '.[]' --raw-output --compact-output | while read -r LINE ; do ... ; done

...lets you process stuff "record by record" pretty consistently. (and `( xxx ; yyy ; zzz ) | jq --slurp '.'` lets you do the reverse, "absorbing" multiple records into an array.

Don't forget `--argjson`

    echo "{}" | jq --argjson FOO "$( cat test.json )" '{ bar: $FOO }'

...lets you "load" json for merging, processing, formatting, etc. The leading "{}" is moderately necessary because `jq` technically _processes_ json, not generates it.

Finally, it's a huge cheat code for string formatting!!

     $ echo "{}" | jq \
        --arg FOO "hello \$world" \
        --arg BAR "complicated \| chars" \
        --arg ONE 1 \
        --arg TWO 2 \
        '"aaa \( $FOO ) and \( $BAR ) and \( ($ONE | tonumber) + ($TWO | tonumber) ) bbb"'
     "aaa hello $world and complicated \\| chars and 3  bbb"

...optionally with `--raw-output` (un-json-quoted), and even supports some regex substitution in strings via `... | gsub(...)`.

Yes, yes... it's overly complicated compared to you and your fancy "programming languages", but sometimes with shell stuff, the ability to _CAPTURE_ arbitrary command output (eg: `--argjson LS_OUTPUT="$( ls -lart ... )"`), but then also use JSON/jq to _safely_ marshal/deaden the data into JSON is really helpful!

[naniwaduni]

> The leading "{}" is moderately necessary because `jq` technically _processes_ json, not generates it.

The --null-input/-n option is the "out-of-the-box" way to achieve this, and avoids a pipe (usually not a big deal, but leaves stdin free and sometimes saves a fork).

This lets you rewrite your first "pattern":

    jq -cnr --argjson SOME_JSON "$SOME_JSON" '$SOME_JSON[]' | while read ...

We also have a "useless use of cat": --slurpfile does that job better:

    jq -n --slurpfile FOO test.json '{bar: $FOO[]}'

(assuming you are assured that test.json contains one json value; --argjson will immediately fail if this is not the case, but with --slurpjson you may need to check that $FOO is a 1-item array.)

And of course, for exactly the single-file single-object case, you can just write:

    jq '{bar: .}' test.json

[great_wubwub]

gron does 90% of what I need for json processing, it's a great first step and often the only necessary step.

https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron

[aidenn0]

I fail to see how your string-formatting example is better than using bash's printf?

[Aaron2222]

It's even included in macOS now (as of Sequoia).