Parse JSON using Command Line.

Hello Guys! This is my second post of this month. In this post I will be explaining on how to parse JSON using command line. A command-line processor can be used to test or debug JSON responses from server. We can easily feed JSON responses from web server into the command-line JSON processor. To parse JSON response using the command line we can download a software called jq which is a JSON parser.To install it and get it running we need to follow the steps below:-
Step 1

Run the command:- sudo apt-get install jq

Step 2

Run the command:- chmod +x ./jq

Step 3

Run the command:- sudo cp jq /usr/bin

The following is an example of a JSON schema(json.txt):-

{
        "name": "Jellyfish",
        "location":
                {
                        "street": "F-60 Sec 11",
                        "city": "Noida",
                        "state": "UP",
                        "country": "India"
                },
        "employees":
                [
                        {
                                "name": "Vivek",
                                "division": "Engineering"
                        },
                        {
                                "name": "Aman",
                                "division": "Engineering"
                        },
                        {
                                "name": "Gaurav",
                                "division": "Marketing"
                        }
                ]
}

To parse a JSON object, type the following command:

$ cat json.txt | jq '.name'

Output:-

"Jellyfish"

To parse a nested JSON object we can use the following:

$ cat json.txt | jq '.location.city'

Output:-

"Noida"

To parse a JSON array:

$ cat json.txt | jq '.employees[0].name'

Output:-

"Vivek"

That was all about JSON.
I hope you liked it. 🙂
Vivek Sadh