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jq Basics

Once installed, you can use jq to parse and manipulate JSON data. Here's a simple example to get you started. Suppose you have a JSON file named user.json:

{
  "name": "John",
  "age": 30,
  "city": "New York"
}

To extract the name field, you would use:

jq '.name' user.json
# "John"

jq with cURL

jq is frequently used with cURL to parse JSON responses directly from HTTP requests. For example, to fetch JSON data from an API and extract a field we can use the object identifier index:

curl https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/users/1 | jq .username
# "Bret"

To get a field from each element in an array you can use the array/object value iterator .[], which can in turn be combined with the identifier index:

curl https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/users | jq '.[].username'
# "Bret"
# "Antonette"
# "Samantha"
# "Karianne"
# "Kamren"
# "Leopoldo_Corkery"
# "Elwyn.Skiles"
# "Maxime_Nienow"
# "Delphine"
# "Moriah.Stanton"

Multiple Fields

curl https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/users/1 | jq '.name, .email'
# "Leanne Graham"
# "Sincere@april.biz"

jq is extremely powerful. We won't cover every feature in this course, but it's a tool you should know about for the future.

Assignment

Make a cURL GET request to the following URL:

https://api.boot.dev/v1/courses_rest_api/learn-http/issues

Use jq to extract each issue's title and estimate from the response. (List all the titles first, then all the estimates).
Redirect output to /tmp/issue_info.txt

Run and submit the CLI tests.