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by packetlost
351 days ago
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I don't really buy that shell / awk is "too weak" to deal with JSON, the ecosystem of tools is just fairly immature as most of the shells common tools predate JSON by at least a decade. `jq` being a pretty reasonable addition to the standard set of tools included in environments by default. IMO the real problem is that JSON doesn't work very well at as a because it's core abstraction is objects. It's a pain to deal with in pretty much every statically typed non-object oriented language unless you parse it into native, predefined data structures (think annotated Go structs, Rust, etc.). |
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Most languages aren't quite that bad. Even if they can't handle JSON very ergonomically, almost every language has at least some concept of nesting objects inside other objects.
What about shell? Just like awk, bash and zsh have a limited number of data types (the same two as awk plus non-associative arrays). So arguably it has the same problem. On the other hand, as you say, in shell it's perfectly idiomatic to use external tools, and jq is one such tool, available on an increasing number of systems. So you may as well store JSON data in your string variables and use jq to access it as needed. Probably won't be any slower than the calls to sed or awk or cut that fill out most shell scripts.
Now, personally, I've gotten into the habit of writing shell scripts with minimal use of external tools. If you stick to shell builtins, your script will run much faster. And both bash and zsh have a pretty decent suite of string manipulation tools, including some regex support, so you often don't actually need sed or awk or cut. However, this also rules out jq, and neither shell has any remotely comparable builtin.
But you might reasonably object that if I care about speed, I would be better off using a real programming language!