#lang en

<<TableOfContents()>>

= jq: The Command-line JSON processor =

= Usage =
== Beautify Json ==
When a curl or other application returns a minified JSON, beautifying it makes it a lot more easy to read.

{{{
curl <url> | jq '.'
}}}
{{{#!highlight json
# Example:

> curl -s http://dummy.restapiexample.com/api/v1/employees
{"status":"success","data":[{"id":"1","employee_name":"Tiger Nixon","employee_salary":"320800","employee_age":"61","profile_image":""},{"id":"2","employee_name":"Garrett Winters","employee_salary":"170750","employee_age":"63","profile_image":""},....

> curl -s http://dummy.restapiexample.com/api/v1/employees | jq '.'
{
  "status": "success",
  "data": [
    {
      "id": "1",
      "employee_name": "Tiger Nixon",
      "employee_salary": "320800",
      "employee_age": "61",
      "profile_image": ""
    },
    {
      "id": "2",
      "employee_name": "Garrett Winters",
      "employee_salary": "170750",
      "employee_age": "63",
      "profile_image": ""
    },...
}}}

== Limiting depth ==
With large unknown datasets, it might be interesting to only see the first few 'levels' of the response
The amount of `[]?` determains how many levels wil be shown
{{{
curl <url> | jq 'del(.[]?[]?[]?[]?)'
}}}
{{{#!highlight json
# Example:

> curl -s http://dummy.restapiexample.com/api/v1/employees | jq 'del(.[]?[]?)'
{
  "status": "success",
  "data": []
}
}}}