CCATP #787 — Bart Busschots on PBS 161 — jq: Maths, Assignment & String Manipulation

In this week’s episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart continues to expand our knowledge on how to use jq to query and manipulate JSON files. We learn how to use mathematical operators on data in our JSON files along with fun functions like floor and absolute value. I even contributed some to the learning by showing examples of how `ceil` (for ceiling), `floor`, and `round` produce curiously different results when operating on negative decimal numbers. We move onto learning about both plain assignment and update assignment. It seems like a small deal but the ability to set a parameter using the plain assignment `=` vs the ability to update a value using ` |=` is is actually huge and has lots of subtleties. I think one of my favorite parts was when Bart took us back to our JavaScript lessons and reminded us of how weird it is on one concept but how jq is much more in line with modern programming languages. I felt like a seasoned programmer because I knew the history of what we’d learned. Finally we learned how you can actually divide strings. I know, weird, right? Ok, that’s enough spoilers. You can find Bart’s fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net. Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript with chapter marks: CCATP_2024_02_17 (https://podfeet.com/transcripts/CCATP_2024_02_17.html) Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and look for the #pbs channel, and check out our pbs-student GitHub Organization (https://github.com/pbs-students). It’s by invitation only but all you have to do is ask Allison!