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CCATP #781 — Bart Busschots on PBS 157 of X — jq: Querying JSON with `jq`

In this week’s episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots continues his instruction on learning more about how to use the jq language to query JSON files. We get into the thick of it as Bart teaches us three important jq concepts: filter chaining, operators, and functions.

To get there we learn about the literal values in JSON and jq and how only null and false are false. Armed with that, Bart explains the not function and once we put those concepts together, this ridiculous command will make perfect sense:

jq -n 'true and true | not' # false

I got such a kick out of that when I first read it in the shownotes earlier this week that I posted my enjoyment of it on Mastodon, and one of the actual developers of jq commented that he was excited to learn we were covering jq in Programming By Stealth!

The any and all functions are nearly as silly sounding but are equally useful. By the end of the episode, we can successfully query the Nobel Prize JSON file to show us all of the prizes won by anyone with the surname “Curie”.

We even have three fun challenges at the end of this episode.

You can find Bart’s fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

mp3 download

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2023_12_09

Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and look for the #pbs channel, and check out our pbs-student GitHub Organization. It’s by invitation only but all you have to do is ask Allison!

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