What the world needs is the inverse program of "jc", where an unparseable json string is expanded into a flat list of lines all of the form "field.subfield=value"
ok well I can understand not wanting json when all you need is something simpler, but I'm not sure if I understand unparseable - I mean if it is JSON then it is parseable.
You can only parse json easily by using json libraries. Plain text, or "field=value" pairs, you can easily cut(1) or grep(1), or sed(1) to your pleasure. This is what I mean by parseable. Parseable trivially by tools that do not understand the format. I can also sed and awk json files, and I do, but it is extremely painful; and more often than not these files are nothing more than simple lists of variables with values, for which the use of json is a ridiculous overkill.
What the world needs is the inverse program of "jc", where an unparseable json string is expanded into a flat list of lines all of the form "field.subfield=value"