Unix command-line JSON parser?

Question

Can anyone recommend a Unix (choose your flavor) JSON parser that could be used to introspect values from a JSON response in a pipeline?

Answer 1

I prefer python -m json.tool which seems to be available per default on most *nix operating systems per default.

$ echo '{"foo":1, "bar":2}' | python -m json.tool
{
    "bar": 2, 
    "foo": 1
}

Note: Depending on your version of python, all keys might get sorted alphabetically, which can or can not be a good thing. With python 2 it was the default to sort the keys, while in python 3.5+ they are no longer sorted automatically, but you have the option to sort by key explicitly:

$ echo '{"foo":1, "bar":2}' | python3 -m json.tool --sort-keys
{
    "bar": 2, 
    "foo": 1
}