Accessing a JSON object in Bash - associative array / list / another model

arrays json bash parsing jq
Evgenii picture Evgenii · Nov 3, 2014 · Viewed 30.4k times · Source

I have a Bash script which gets data in JSON, I want to be able to convert the JSON into an accessible structure - array / list / or other model which would be easy to parse the nested data.

Example:

{
  "SALUTATION": "Hello world",
  "SOMETHING": "bla bla bla Mr. Freeman"
}

I want to get the value like the following: echo ${arr[SOMETHING]}

[ Different approach is optional as well. ]

Answer

fedorqui 'SO stop harming' picture fedorqui 'SO stop harming' · Nov 3, 2014

If you want key and value, and based on How do i convert a json object to key=value format in JQ, you can do:

$ jq -r "to_entries|map(\"\(.key)=\(.value|tostring)\")|.[]" file
SALUTATION=Hello world
SOMETHING=bla bla bla Mr. Freeman

In a more general way, you can store the values into an array myarray[key] = value like this, just by providing jq to the while with the while ... do; ... done < <(command) syntax:

declare -A myarray
while IFS="=" read -r key value
do
    myarray[$key]="$value"
done < <(jq -r 'to_entries|map("(.key)=(.value)")|.[]' file)

And then you can loop through the values like this:

for key in "${!myarray[@]}"
do
    echo "$key = ${myarray[$key]}"
done

For this given input, it returns:

SALUTATION = Hello world
SOMETHING = bla bla bla Mr. Freeman

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