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Comment by cellover | Hacker News Reader

I did not know about jq, thanks!

Without jq, you can still pipe to python json.tool module:

$ curl http://domain.com | python -m json.tool

I used to do this, but now I use jq. The thing about the Python version is that Python doesn't have ordered dictionaries, so the output isn't in the same order as the raw JSON. jq doesn't have that issue which is nice.

Python does have ordered dictionaries, but the json decoder defaults to regular dictionaries. This is easily overridable with JSONDecoder.

Is there a one-liner you can use from the shell that preserves order?

Starting with 3.5[0] that's the standard behavior.

One liner-wise, you could create an alias

  echo '{"foo":12, "bar": 11}' | python -c 'import json as j, collections as c, sys as s; j.dump(j.load(s.stdin, object_pairs_hook=c.OrderedDict), s.stdout, indent=4)'

[0] https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/3.5/Lib/json/tool.py#...

jq is almost a full fledge programming language, like xquery, surprisingly powerful (in good and bad ways). Nice to port fragile sed-grep LoC.

I often use jq to extract data from REST apis, e.g. email addresses I need in a CSV file.

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