Parse JSON to array in a shell script

Question

I\'m trying to parse a JSON object within a shell script into an array.

e.g.: [Amanda, 25, http://mywebsite.com]

The JSON looks like:

{
  \"         


        

Answer 1

You can use a sed one liner to achieve this:

array=( $(sed -n "/{/,/}/{s/[^:]*:[[:blank:]]*//p;}" json ) )

Result:

$ echo ${array[@]}
"Amanda" "25" "http://mywebsite.com"

If you do not need/want the quotation marks then the following sed will do away with them:

array=( $(sed -n '/{/,/}/{s/[^:]*:[^"]*"\([^"]*\).*/\1/p;}' json) )

Result:

$ echo ${array[@]}
Amanda 25 http://mywebsite.com

It will also work if you have multiple entries, like

$ cat json
{
  "name"       : "Amanda" 
  "age"        : "25"
  "websiteurl" : "http://mywebsite.com"
}

{
   "name"       : "samantha"
   "age"        : "31"
   "websiteurl" : "http://anotherwebsite.org"
}

$ echo ${array[@]}
Amanda 25 http://mywebsite.com samantha 31 http://anotherwebsite.org

UPDATE:

As pointed out by mklement0 in the comments, there might be an issue if the file contains embedded whitespace, e.g., "name" : "Amanda lastname". In this case Amanda and lastname would both be read into seperate array fields each. To avoid this you can use readarray, e.g.,

readarray -t array < <(sed -n '/{/,/}/{s/[^:]*:[^"]*"\([^"]*\).*/\1/p;}' json2)

This will also take care of any globbing issues, also mentioned in the comments.