Re: trying to parse lines from an awkwardly formatted HAR file ...

[Greg Wooledge <greg@wooledge.org>]

On Sat, Mar 23, 2024 at 08:18:46AM +0000, mgrant@grant.org wrote:
> jq is an amazing tool, it's a full fledged programming language.  You just
> need to continue concatenating your desired output.  You might even find you
> can do what you want all inside a jq script instead of what you're doing.
> Consider writing a jq script with the first line of the script #!/usr/bin/jq

Yeah.  This.  If you have to process JSON inputs in a bash script, use jq.
Do not attempt to roll your own JSON parser.  That work has already been
done, and besides that, bash is a *terrible* language in which to write
a parser.

Here's an *incredibly* brief glimpse.  It can do so much more:

hobbit:~$ json='{"foo":"bar", "names": ["Alice","Bob"], "phone": {"Alice":"555-1234", "Bob":"555-2345"}}'
hobbit:~$ printf %s "$json" | jq
{
  "foo": "bar",
  "names": [
    "Alice",
    "Bob"
  ],
  "phone": {
    "Alice": "555-1234",
    "Bob": "555-2345"
  }
}
hobbit:~$ printf %s "$json" | jq .foo
"bar"
hobbit:~$ printf %s "$json" | jq -r .foo
bar
hobbit:~$ printf %s "$json" | jq -r .phone.Alice
555-1234
hobbit:~$ printf %s "$json" | jq -r '.names[1]'
Bob