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jq recipes

I never remember how to do things with jq. Hopefully some sort of mental model emerges from these recipes.

Formatting JSON data

jq has a set of string formatting and escaping filters.

To convert an array to CSV or TSV, pick the properties you’re interested in and apply the @csv or @tsv filters:

jq -r '.[] | [.href, .title] | @tsv' links.json

You can also do string interpolation to build XML/HTML:

jq -r '.[] | "<p><a href=\"\(.href)\">\(.description | @html)</a><p><blockquote>\(.extended | @html)</blockquote><p>\(.tags | @html)</p>"'

• the several levels of nested quotes means we need to escape the last level of double quotes;
• note the usage of the @html escape filter that prevents interpolated values from breaking the markup.