PBS 162 of X — jq: Altering Arrays & Dictionaries

Bart Busschots is back to teach us how to alter arrays and dictionaries in JSON files using jq. Bart went through his challenge solution on cleaning up the Nobel Prize database and I learned a lot from it. Maybe he’d already taught all of it to us before but I sure wouldn’t have been able to put the pieces together. For the new content, we learned how to alter arrays. We mastered sorting and reversing, how to add and remove elements, how to deduplicate the values within, and how to flatten even nested arrays. From there we learned how to manipulate dictionaries by adding and removing keys. It’s a very focused lesson that continues to show how powerful the jq language is. I think my favorite part though was when Bart made an existential philosophy observation when he said “Everything exists with the value of null.” You can find Bart’s fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.