jq JSON pretty print

 

 Recently I have been using curl to test some RESTful service that return JSON data.  I wanted to pipe the output into something that would pretty print it similar to what you get from http://jsonlint.com/ [1].  I found ./jq http://stedolan.github.io/jq/ [2]

The jq tool can do a lot, in fact the describe it as a sed for JSON data.   I only want to use it to pretty print at the moment so I am going to show how to install it on Ubuntu 14.04, OS X via brew, and Cygwin; then how to use it to pretty print.

Installation

JQ's installation page http://stedolan.github.io/jq/download/ [3]

Ubuntu 14.04

Looks like in Ubuntu 14.04 it's pretty simple

> sudo apt-get install jq

Then to see which version it is run the following

> jq -V

It installed version 1.3

But, if you really want version 1.4 (the latest "stable" build as of 2/25/2015), you can do the following.   (I ran into some issues doing this, if you are going to do it read the entire thing first so you can run all the fixes at once)

Remove the currently installed jq

> sudo apt-get remove jq

Clone the repository

> git clone https://github.com/stedolan/jq.git

Checkout v 1.4 tag

> cd jq      > git checkout tags/jq-1.4

Build and install it

> autoreconf -i

After  I ran autoreconf -i , I ran into an issue

Makefile.am:35: error: Libtool library used but 'LIBTOOL' is undefined.

I found this post http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18978252/error-libtool-library-used-but-libtool-is-undefined [4] .  Looks like I need to run libtoolize, which I first need to install libtool.

> sudo apt-get install libtool

Now let me restart… Build and install (but run libtoolize first)

> libtoolize      > autoreconf -i      > ./configure      > make

After running make I got another error after running make.

/bin/bash: flex: command not found.

To fix this problem install flex

> sudo apt-get install flex

Now re-run make

> make

./config/ylwrap: line 176: yacc: command not found

To fix this problem install byacc

> sudo apt-get install byacc

Now re-run make

> make

Now I get this error. 

To fix this problem install bison

> sudo apt-get install bison

I think that worked!

Now to install it run

> sudo make install

Test it out

> jq -V

As a side note you may need to install gcc (I had done this previously on this box) To do that run the following command.

> sudo apt-get install gcc

Cygwin install

 (I ran into some issues doing this, if you are going to do it read the entire thing first so you can run all the fixes at once)

Before you start the cygwin install make sure you have the following installed

autoconf

automake

Don't forget to check Automake: wrapper for automake and aclocal

gcc-core

make

git

Clone the repository

> git clone https://github.com/stedolan/jq.git

Checkout v 1.4 tag

> cd jq      > git checkout tags/jq-1.4

Build and install it

> autoreconf -i

After  I ran autoreconf -i , I ran into an issue (same as before)

Makefile.am:35: error: Libtool library used but 'LIBTOOL' is undefined.

Run the Cygwin Setup and search for libtool

Install this package.

I found this post http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18978252/error-libtool-library-used-but-libtool-is-undefined [4] .  Looks like I need to run libtoolize, which I first need to install libtool.

Now let me restart… Build and install (but run libtoolize first)

> libtoolize      > autoreconf -i      > ./configure      > make

After running make I got another error after running make.

/bin/bash: flex: command not found.

Run the Cygwin Setup and search for flex

Install this package.

Now re-run make

> make

./config/ylwrap: line 176: yacc: command not found

Run the Cygwin Setup and search for byacc

Install this package.

Also search for Bison

Install this package

I restarted at this point and ran these commands

> libtoolize      > autoreconf -i      > ./configure      > make

Now run make install

> make install

Test it out

> jq -V

OS X Brew

This assumes you have brew installed if you don't head over here http://brew.sh/ [7] and follow their install instructions.

Run this command to install it

> brew install jq

And it's installed J

Test it out

> jq -V

Brew does load version 1.4!

Testing it out

Now that it's all installed let's test it out.

I poked around http://www.data.gov/ [5] and found this JSON to test against.   I can open this page http://catalog.data.gov/dataset?res_format=JSON&_res_format_limit=0 which shows all the datasets which can send back JSON.

This led me to http://www.bls.gov/developers/api_unix.htm#unix2 [6] which lists a curl to access some of their data.  Then I found this page http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/surveymost?bls which lists some ID number for some interesting labor statistics.

I think LNS11000000 looks interesting.   I am going to curl it and pipe its output to jq

> curl http://api.bls.gov/publicAPI/v2/timeseries/data/LNS11000000 | jq .

When piping json jq requies a "." after it to pretty print the entire JSON object.

Here are my results

Pretty cool J  Looks like we have 157 million people in the workforce as of January 2015.

I ran this on OSX, Ubuntu, and Cygwin.  All of them had the same results.

References

[1]        JSONLint

                        http://jsonlint.com/

                Accessed 2/2015

[2]        ./jq

                        http://stedolan.github.io/jq/

                Accessed 2/2015

[3]        ./jq installation page

                        http://stedolan.github.io/jq/download/

                Accessed 2/2015

[4]        error: Libtool library used but 'LIBTOOL' is undefined

                        http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18978252/error-libtool-library-used-but-libtool-is-undefined

                Accessed 2/2015

[5]        Data.gov

                        http://www.data.gov/

                Accessed 2/2015

[6]        Top Picks

                        http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/surveymost?bls

                Accessed 2/2015

[7]        Brew Home Page

                        http://brew.sh/

                Accessed 2/2015