The important part is to learn the limits of any tool. Nowadays I no longer use jq for any long or complicated tasking. Filter and view data? jq is fine. Anything more and I just cook up a python script.
How do you get complex data structures to work? I was alienated from scripting on zsh because I wanted something like a dict and realised I would have to write my own implementation. Is there a work around for that?
This will do nicely - I had several workflows where I’d hit an API and get a massive super nested JSON as output; I’d use jq to get the specific data from the whole thing and do a bunch of stuff on this filtered data. I pretty much resigned to using python because I’d have successively complicated requirements and looking up how to do each new thing was slowing me down massively.
Why spend 30 seconds manually editing some text when you can spend 30 minutes clobbering together a pipeline involving awk, sed and jq
Or 60 minutes making it all work just with jq functions.
to be fair, out of those three, jq invokes the least existential dread in me
The important part is to learn the limits of any tool. Nowadays I no longer use jq for any long or complicated tasking. Filter and view data? jq is fine. Anything more and I just cook up a python script.
i’m more of a bash fan tbh. Ever since i started using linux, python started to irritate me
How do you get complex data structures to work? I was alienated from scripting on zsh because I wanted something like a dict and realised I would have to write my own implementation. Is there a work around for that?
I mean, there’s a point in data structure complexity where it’s useful to use Python.
But as to dicts, sure. You’re looking for zsh’s “associative array”. Bash has it too.
zsh
bash
This will do nicely - I had several workflows where I’d hit an API and get a massive super nested JSON as output; I’d use jq to get the specific data from the whole thing and do a bunch of stuff on this filtered data. I pretty much resigned to using python because I’d have successively complicated requirements and looking up how to do each new thing was slowing me down massively.
TIL I am an OP wizard.