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A Shell Command To Create JSON Jo

The document describes a shell command called "jo" that allows users to easily generate valid JSON from the command line. Jo understands data types like strings, numbers, booleans, arrays and nested objects. It aims to improve on methods like echo and printf that can become complicated when generating JSON. Jo pretty prints output and supports reading values from files or encoding binary data to base64. The creator hopes jo will be useful for testing purposes where generating JSON programmatically is needed.

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ano
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49 views2 pages

A Shell Command To Create JSON Jo

The document describes a shell command called "jo" that allows users to easily generate valid JSON from the command line. Jo understands data types like strings, numbers, booleans, arrays and nested objects. It aims to improve on methods like echo and printf that can become complicated when generating JSON. Jo pretty prints output and supports reading values from files or encoding binary data to base64. The creator hopes jo will be useful for testing purposes where generating JSON programmatically is needed.

Uploaded by

ano
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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A shell command to create JSON: jo https://www.printfriendly.

com/p/g/ABV3AZ

A shell command to create JSON: jo


jpmens.net/2016/03/05/a-shell-command-to-create-json-jo/

I got tired of attempting to get shell scripts to produce valid JSON. You’ve likely seen something like this before:

echo '{"name":"Jane"}'

It gets merrier if an element contains an environment variable: open double, close single, add variable, open
single, blergh.

A here! script will do it as will a a printf(1), but neither much improve legibility, and if strings contain quotes, it
becomes almost impossible to make a script produce JSON.

printf '{"name": "%s"}\n' "Jane"

Enter jo:

$ jo name=Jane
{"name":"Jane"}

The idea occurred to me late at night, and I don’t know


why this has taken so long to happen:

$ jo time=$(date +%s) dir=$HOME


{"time":1457195712,"dir":"/Users/jpm"}

Bam! Jo tries to be clever about types and knows


null , booleans, strings and numbers. It does arrays,
and it pretty-prints on demand:

$ jo -p -a spring summer winter


[
"spring",
"summer",
"winter"
]

Inspired by a comment on HN, I added another hack: if a key’s value begins with an opening brace ( { ) or a
bracket ( [ ]) we attempt to decode JSON from it; this allows jo to add objects or arrays (use -a !) to itself.
Watch:

$ jo -p name=JP object=$(jo fruit=Orange point=$(jo x=10 y=20) number=17) sunday=false


{
"name": "JP",
"object": {
"fruit": "Orange",
"point": {
"x": 10,
"y": 20
},
"number": 17
},
"sunday": false
}

jo also supports nested types natively:

1 dari 2 02/03/21 14.52


A shell command to create JSON: jo https://www.printfriendly.com/p/g/ABV3AZ

$ jo -p number=17 pass=true geo[lon]=88 geo[cc]=ES point[]=1 point[]=2 geo[lat]=123.45


{
"number": 17,
"pass": true,
"geo": {
"lon": 88,
"cc": "ES",
"lat": 123.45
},
"point": [
1,
2
]
}

Why did I do this? I need lots of JSON for testing OwnTracks, and this just looks better in scripts.

$ jo _type=location \
cog=$((RANDOM % 360)) \
t=u \
lat=48.85833 \
lon=2.29513 \
acc=5 \
tid=JJ \
tst=$(date +%s) | mosquitto_pub -t owntracks/jjolie/test -l

A suggestion by Andrew Bibby brought along the possibility of obtaining JSON element values from files, so I
added @file to read a file (sans traling newline or carriage return) into a value as well as something which I
use a lot, convert binary files to base64, using the %file syntax:

$ jo _type=card name="Vanessa" face=%vanessa.png


{"_type":"card","name":"Vanessa","face":"iVBORw0KGgoAAA ... QmCC"}

And it has a man page. Go get it. Jo!

Updates:

Caius Durling provided a Homebrew tap for jo, but jo is in Homebrew Formulae now, so brew
install jo .
jo has a logo which it created itself; colors inspired by something Frederic Cambus said :-)
Shawn Webb added jo to HardenedBSD’s ports.
I’ve converted jo to use autotools; releases will be published here.
Alessio Sergi has added jo to voidlinux; install with xbps-install -Su jo
I’ve built a Win32 binary which you can get from releases/.
Lance Chen has an ArchLinux port of jo.
Vincent Bernat has submitted jo to Debian.

2 dari 2 02/03/21 14.52

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