Command line tool for parsing JSON input for Unix?

Question

I'm looking for tool which would allow me to parse JSON from a pipeline. Like converting it to some other common formats which are easier to parse or sort or to retrieve certain elements (like XPath).

Answer 1

This "json" tool I found is very flexible.

json is a fast CLI tool for working with JSON. It is a single-file node.js script with no external deps (other than node.js itself).

Example usage:

$ echo '{"foo":"bar"}' | json foo
bar

$ echo '{"fred":{"age":42}}' | json fred.age    # '.' for property access
42

$ echo '{"age":10}' | json -e 'this.age++'
{
  "age": 11
}

Docs/features at http://trentm.com/json/

---

A list of alternative tools is also given at the bottom which are:

• jq: http://stedolan.github.io/jq/
• json:select: http://jsonselect.org/
• json-command: https://github.com/zpoley/json-command
• JSONPath: http://goessner.net/articles/JsonPath/, http://code.google.com/p/jsonpath/wiki/Javascript
• jsawk: https://github.com/micha/jsawk
• jshon: http://kmkeen.com/jshon/
• json2: https://github.com/vi/json2

Answer 2

You can use pythons supplied JSON Library to parse into python objects and then output in a variety of other formats also supported either by the python library or by additional libraries. These include XML/xpath.