I often use ijq, or "interactive jq", to explore JSON, and also to improve my jq fu, because it gives me immediate visual feedback. Here's an example.

There's a wrapper around jq called ijq (short for "interactive jq") which is a bit like a REPL in that it affords immediate feedback. It's a lovely program, and I use it a lot.

Yesterday I shared a short video of an example of how it can be used to explore a JSON dataset and I thought I'd give that example a more permanent home here on the blog.

(There's an asciinema version of this too).

In practising a little jq, I thought I'd use it to find out the most common city in the Customers and Suppliers by Cities entityset in the V4 Northwind service.

This is the invocation I ended up with:

.value
| group_by(.City)
| map([length, first.City])
| sort_by(.[0])
| reverse
| first[1]

Here's a brief breakdown of the invocation I ended up with:

• .value gives me the entire array of objects in the dataset, each one of which represents a customer or supplier in a city
• group_by(...) collects array elements together that have the same path expression specified (in this case the City property), producing an array of arrays
• map(...) is much like map in other languages, in that it will apply the function or filter given to the input array, producing a new array
• [length, first.City] uses the array constructor ([...]) to produce an array of two elements, the first being the length of the input (the inner array containing the same-city grouped objects) and the value of the City property for the first element in that array*
• sort_by(...) sorts the input array (which is now the one with length-and-city name elements) by the first item (.[0]), i.e. by the length
• reverse simply reverses the order of the items of the array
• first[1] then this picks the second item ([1]) of the first element, which after the reverse-sort will be the length-and-city pair with the highest length

*during the interactive session, I'd just guessed that there would be a first function, and there was!

For those of you wondering, I deliberately chose to reverse the list before picking out the first element, so the element would be at the top and therefore visible in ijq's output window:

| sort_by(.[0])
| reverse
| first[1]

But I could have just as well done this:

| sort_by(.[0])
| last[1]

As a kind fellow rightly pointed out in the comments to my previous post JSON object values into CSV with jq - TIMTOWTDI, or "there is more than one way to do it", an adage from the Perl community.