Parsing Json data columnwise in shell

Question

When I run a command I get a response like this

{

    \"status\": \"available\",
    \"managed\": true,
    \"name\":vdisk7,
    \"support\":{
    \"status\         


        

Answer 1

JSON parser is better for this task

awk and sed are utilities to parse line-oriented text, but not json. What if your json formatting will change ? (some lines will go on one line ?).

You should use any standard json parser out there. Or use some powerful scripting language, such as PHP, Python, Ruby, etc.

I can provide you with example on how to do it with python.

What if I can't use powerful scripting language ?

If you totally unable to use python, then there is utility jq out there: link

If you have some recent distro, jq maybe already in repositories (example: Ubuntu 13.10 has it in repos).

I can use python!

I would do that using simple python inline script.

For example we have some some_command that returns json as a result.

We have to get value of data["name"].

Here we go:

some_command | python -c "import json, sys; print json.load(sys.stdin)['name']"

It will output vdisk7 in your case

For this to work you need to be sure, json is fully valid.

If you have a list of json objects:

[
  {
    ...
    "name": "vdisk17"
    ...
  },
  {
    ...
    "name": "vdisk18"
    ...
  },
  {
    ...
    "name": "vdisk19"
    ...
  },
...
]

You could use some list comprehensions:

some_command | python -c "import json, sys; [sys.stdout.write(x['name'] + '\n') for x in json.load(sys.stdin)]"

It will output:

vdisk17
vdisk18
vdisk19