Using JQ and Bash To Parse JSON

Here’s a very quick little thing I just had to do, that maybe useful to you at some point in the future. The idea is that I had a JSON file (technically some JS to begin with), and I wanted to create a new file in the current directory for each entry in the JSON.

Here’s what I had:

import { Sector } from "../../types";

export const sectors: Sector[] = [
  {
    title: "Accounting",
    slug: "accounting",
  },
  {
    title: "Automotive",
    slug: "automotive",
  },
  {
    title: "Agriculture",
    slug: "agriculture",
  },
  // ... etc
];Code language: TypeScript (typescript)

That being TypeScript, I couldn’t directly take that as JSON because the title and slug keys are not quoted.

I guess I could have dumped this out with JSON.stringify, but it’s easy to copy / paste that stuff directly into an online conversion website that already exists:

Copy and paste that ‘result’ data into a new JSON file.

For this I made a new temporary directory:

cd /tmp
mkdir /tmp/whatever
cd whatever

touch data.json
vim data.jsonCode language: Shell Session (shell)

That fires up vim, but use whatever editor you feel comfortable with. I am no vim ninja, but I know enough for this kind of thing.

Once in vim, press i to switch to insert mode, then right click and paste:

Once done, hit esc to exit insert mode, and then directly type :wq to write and quit (or save and exit).

You should be dumped back to your command line. Jolly good.

Now you need a new shell script.

I’m going to repeat the vim process.

touch a.sh
vim a.shCode language: Shell Session (shell)

Call your script whatever you like, I’m just lazy so a.sh it is.

You should now be back in vim, so it’s time for more insert / escape / write and quit:

for item in $(cat data.json | jq -r '.[] | @base64'); do
    _jq() {
     echo ${item} | base64 --decode | jq -r ${1}
    }

    touch "$(_jq '.slug').ts"
doneCode language: Bash (bash)

This command will read the data from the data.json file and iterate over each object in the array.

For each object, it will extract the slug value using the jq tool and create a new file with the name {slug}.ts using the touch command.

You will need to have the jq tool installed on your system for this command to work. If you don’t, that is as easy as:

sudo apt-get install jqCode language: Shell Session (shell)

In order to execute the shell script, it needs to be made executable:

sudo chmod +x a.shCode language: Shell Session (shell)

And then you can run it:

./a.shCode language: Shell Session (shell)

Which should give you:

Neat.