How to parse JSON string via command line on Linux

[Amal John Ronkha]

A command-line JSON parser can be handy when you test or debug JSON web services. You can feed JSON-formatted responses from web services into the command-line JSON parser, thereby easily inspecting otherwise hard-to-read JSON responses or extracting individual objects from them.

How to parse JSON string from the command line?

On Linux, there is a command-line JSON processor called jq which does exactly that. Using jq, you can parse, filter, map, and transform JSON-structured data effortlessly.

To install jq on Linux, simply download its binary (available for 32-bit and 64-bit system separately) as follows.

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$ wget http://stedolan.github.io/jq/download/linux32/jq (32-bit system)
$ wget http://stedolan.github.io/jq/download/linux64/jq (64-bit system)
$ chmod +x ./jq
$ sudo cp jq /usr/bin
The following examples illustrate how to parse JSON-structured data with jq.

An example JSON Schema:

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$ cat json.txt

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{
        "server": "US-Cloud",
        "location":
                {
                        "street": "1600 Amphitheatre Parkway",
                        "city": "Mountain View",
                        "state": "California",
                        "country": "US"
                },
        "support":
                [
                        {
                                "name": "James",
                                "division": "Call Support"
                        },
                        {
                                "name": "Peter",
                                "division": "Mail Support"
                        },
                        {
                                "name": "Alice",
                                "division": "Live Support"
                        }
                ]
}
To parse a JSON object:

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$ cat json.txt | jq '.server'

US-Cloud

To parse a nested JSON object:

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

"Mountain View"

To parse a JSON array:

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

"Michael"

To extract specific fields from a JSON object:

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$ cat json.txt | jq '.location | {street, city}'

{
  "city": "Mountain View",
  "street": "1600 Amphitheatre Parkway"
}

Hope this helps!