Basic Usage

In most cases you would use bash2json for simple JSON queries

bash2json '{ "foo": "bar" }' 'foo'
# `"bar"

If you don’t need " when querying strings, just use -r parameter

bash2json '{ "foo": "bar" }' 'foo' -r
# bar

Also you might need to get child key inside another object

bash2json '{ "foo": { "foo2": "bar" } }' 'foo.foo2' -r
# bar

… or it’s inside an array

bash2json '{ "foo": [{ "foo": "bar" },{ "foo": "othervalue" }] }' 'foo[0].foo' -r
# bar

You can also make JSON more readable by using --pretty option:

bash2json '{ "foo": [{ "foo": "bar" },{ "foo": "othervalue" }] }' --pretty
#{
#  "foo": [
#    {
#      "foo": "bar"
#    },
#    {
#      "foo": "othervalue"
#    }
#  ]
#}

You can validate JSON using --validate:

bash2json '{ "foo": [{ "foo": "bar" },{ "foo": "othervalue" }] }' --validate
# returns nothing on success

If object is missing any character, bash2json will return error:

bash2json '{ "foo": [{ "foo": "bar" },{ "foo": "othervalue" } ' --validate
# error: missing 1 `}`
# error: missing 1 `]`

Or if you forgot to quote some string:

bash2json '{ "foo": [{ "foo": "bar" },{ "foo": othervalue }] }' --validate
# error: unquoted characters: othervalue

json_validate function is being executed each time you do any action with JSON (except for —to-json). Because json_validate reads each character, it can make processing big objects very slow. In case that you’re sure, that your object is valid, you can skip validation using --no-validate option:

bash2json '{ "foo": [{ "foo": "bar" },{ "foo": "othervalue" }] }' 'foo[0].foo' -r --validate