jpath

With modern software, json has become a de-facto standard for transport between multiple systems. From UI including backend miccroservices. But analyzing json data is painful. Which is why there are so many competing standards vying for attention, including yaml, toml etc.
But parsing json didn't have to be this hard. Back in the days of xml, we had xpath, which made searching and parsing xml documents easier. For json, there is very little.

There is jq and more recently jsonpath
jq is feature rich owing to active development
jpath is an attempt at providing a very easy to use DSL and parser for json documents

Concepts

jpath is optimized for find/filtering json documents. And ease-of-use of such operations. jpath is inspired by the jsonpath spec, and tries to improve upon it by reducing/eliminating a lot of special characters ($, ", @ etc.) needed to get to the desired output
An attempt is made to make the user expression as simple as possible without having to worry about arrays and objects. So, as a foundational tenet, all json documents are treated as arrays. If the input json doc is an object, it is internally represented as an array of one json document. Likewise, the output is always wrapped into an array to make it easy to use it in further piped expressions.

In order to make the user expressions simpler, we have made the following enhancements to the program

• very limited special characters to know and learn
• no need to check whether a document is an object or array
• no need to wrap strings in double quotes - simplifies the expression
• space characters in expressions are optional - for better readability
• inline operations on json - reduces copying of data and leads to faster processing

Note: Input json is provided by this api

Concepts - syntax - json document

Name	Operator	Example	Description
Separator	.	results.name	descends to the given operators while maintaining json array output format
Filter*	[filter]	results[gender=female]	[] is an array, any expression inside the array forms the filter, see supported filters
Count	#	results.#	count of number of items in the array
Slice	[1:3]	results[1:2]	sub-array from the given indexes
Selection (TBD)	{}	results.name.{first,last}	prints only the selected fields from the results

Concepts - supported filters

Name	Operator	Example	Description
Equality	=	results[name.title=Mr]	find results whose title is Mr
Non-Equality	!=	results[name.title!=Mr]	find results whose title is not Mr
Less Than	<	results[dob.age<60]	find results whose age is less than 60
Greater Than	>	results[dob.age>20]	find results whose age is greater than 20
Regex Match	~	results[name.first~^P]	find results whose first name starts with a P

Concepts - comparison with other tools

Description	jq	jsonpath	jpath
find females in the result	.results[] | select(.gender == "female")	$.results[?(@.gender=="female")]	results[gender=female]
find count of results from above	N/A	N/A	results[gender=female].#
find name, dob and cell# for Males	.results[] | select(.name.title = "Mr") | {first:.name.first,last:.name.last,dob:.dob.date,cell:.cell}	N/A	'results[name.title=Mr].{name.first,name.last,dob.date,cell}'

Concepts - command line flags

flag	default	description
-t|--table	false	Prints output in a tabular format. Works only for object types
-u|--unwrap	false	Unwraps the output. Needed for processing streamed output (ex: kafka output)
-c|--compress	false	Minifies the json output
-H|--header	false	header values for http request

Note

If -t|--table is provided, the program attempts to print the output in tabular format and ignores other flags

Unwrap and Compress examples

example json: [{"one":"01", "two":"02"},{"three":"03", "four":"04"}]
+-------------------+-------------------------------+------------------------------------------------------+
|                   |  --unwrap=true                |           --unwrap=false                             |
|-------------------|-------------------------------|------------------------------------------------------|
|--compact=true     | {"one":"01","two":"02"}       | [{"one":"01","two":"02"},{"three":"03","four":"04"}] |
|                   | {"three":"03","four":"04"}    |                                                      |
|-------------------|-------------------------------|------------------------------------------------------|
|--compact=false    | {                             | [                                                    |
|                   |   "one": "01",                |   {                                                  |
|                   |   "two": "02"                 |     "one": "01",                                     |
|                   | }                             |     "two": "02"                                      |
|                   | {                             |   },                                                 |
|                   |   "three": "03",              |   {                                                  |
|                   |   "four": "04"                |     "three": "03",                                   |
|                   | }                             |     "four": "04"                                     |
|                   |                               |   }                                                  |
|                   |                               | ]                                                    |
+-------------------+-------------------------------+------------------------------------------------------+

Credits

Credits and heartfelt thanks to the following opensource projects that makes jpath a reality

1. jsonparser - heart of the system for fast json parsing
2. colorjson - colored terminal output
3. tablewriter - table output
4. cobra - cli parsing