Printing a string wrote each character with a separate call, one fwrite() per character, or one jv_string_append_buf() for tojson and tostring, which made output of string-heavy data slow. Scan ahead for the next byte that needs escaping and write the run of bytes before it with a single call, without changing the output. Printing strings is now significantly faster, most of all for long strings with few characters to escape, and the same applies to tojson and tostring. With --ascii-output, text that is almost all non-ASCII is about the same speed, since nearly every byte is escaped anyway.
jq
jq is a lightweight and flexible command-line JSON processor akin to sed,awk,grep, and friends for JSON data. It's written in portable C and has zero runtime dependencies, allowing you to easily slice, filter, map, and transform structured data.
Documentation
- Official Documentation: jqlang.org
- Try jq Online: play.jqlang.org
Installation
Prebuilt Binaries
Download the latest releases from the GitHub release page.
The platform-specific assets are standalone executables, not archives. On macOS and Linux,
rename the downloaded file to jq and make it executable with chmod +x jq.
Docker Image
Pull the jq image to start quickly with Docker.
Run with Docker
Example: Extracting the version from a package.json file
docker run --rm -i ghcr.io/jqlang/jq:latest < package.json '.version'
Example: Extracting the version from a package.json file with a mounted volume
docker run --rm -i -v "$PWD:$PWD" -w "$PWD" ghcr.io/jqlang/jq:latest '.version' package.json
Building from source
Dependencies
- libtool
- make
- automake
- autoconf
Instructions
git submodule update --init # if building from git to get oniguruma
autoreconf -i # if building from git
./configure --with-oniguruma=builtin
make clean # if upgrading from a version previously built from source
make -j8
make check
sudo make install
Build a statically linked version:
make LDFLAGS=-all-static
If you're not using the latest git version but instead building a released tarball (available on the release page), skip the autoreconf step, and flex or bison won't be needed.
Cross-Compilation
For details on cross-compilation, check out the GitHub Actions file and the cross-compilation wiki page.
Community & Support
- Questions & Help: Stack Overflow (jq tag)
- Chat & Community: Join us on Discord
- Wiki & Advanced Topics: Explore the Wiki
License
jq is released under the MIT License. jq's documentation is
licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY 3.0.
jq uses parts of the open source C library "decNumber", which is distributed
under ICU License