[jzelinskie]

This is an incredibly useful one-liner. Thank you for sharing!

I'm a big fan of jq, having written my own jq wrapper that supports multiple formats (github.com/jzelinskie/faq), but these days I find myself more quickly reaching for Python when I get any amount of complexity. Being able to use uv scripts in Python has considerably lowered the bar for me to use it for scripting.

Where are you drawing the line?

[rwiggins]

Hmm. I stick to jq for basically any JSON -> JSON transformation or summarization (field extraction, renaming, etc.). Perhaps I should switch to scripts more. uv is... such a game changer for Python, I don't think I've internalized it yet!

But as an example of about where I'd stop using jq/shell scripting and switch to an actual program... we have a service that has task queues. The number of queues for an endpoint is variable, but enumerable via `GET /queues` (I'm simplifying here of course), which returns e.g. `[0, 1, 2]`. There was a bug where certain tasks would get stuck in a non-terminal state, blocking one of those queues. So, I wanted a simple little snippet to find, for each queue, (1) which task is currently executing and (2) how many tasks are enqueued. It ended up vaguely looking like:

    for q in $(curl -s "$endpoint/queues" | jq -r '.[]'); do
        curl -s "$endpoint/queues/$q" \
        | jq --arg q "$q" '
            {
                "queue": $q,
                "executing": .currently_executing_tasks,
                "num_enqueued": (.enqueued_tasks | length)
            }'
    done | jq -s

which ends up producing output like (assuming queue 0 was blocked)

    [
        {
            "queue": 0,
            "executing": [],
            "num_enqueued": 100
        },
        ...
    ]

I think this is roughly where I'd start to consider "hmm, maybe a proper script would do this better". I bet the equivalent Python is much easier to read and probably not much longer.

Although, I think this example demonstrates how I typically use jq, which is like a little multitool. I don't usually write really complicated jq.

[Elucalidavah]

> wrapper that supports multiple formats

Is there a way to preserve key ordering, particularly for yaml output? And to customize the color output? Or, how feasible is it to add that?

[dotancohen]

I could Google it, but tell a bit more about uv scripts. Isn't uv a package manager like pip?

[easton]

uv has a feature where you can put a magic comment at the top of a script and it will pull all the dependencies into its central store when you do “uv run …”. And then it makes a special venv too I think? That part’s cloudier.

https://docs.astral.sh/uv/guides/scripts/

Makes it a snap to have a one file python script without having to explicitly pip install requests or whatever into a venv.

[Bluestein]

May I also add this ain't a mere one liner. It's a masterclass!