Project introduction
Before we get into our CLI application, it would help to understand a bit about how jq works given it's a core part of our application's desired functionality. As previously mentioned, jq allows for the creation of filters that are used to describe how the input JSON data should be transformed.
A filter consists of a string of various characters and symbols, some of which have special meaning. The most basic filter is , also known as the Identity Filter. This filter leaves the input data unchanged, which can be useful in cases where you just want to format the input data given jq will pretty print all output by default. The identity filter also represents the input data as it travels through multiple filters. More on this soon.
jq includes various other filters whose purpose is to access specific portions of the input data or to control how the filter is executed, the most common ones being the following:
- Object identifier-index
- Array...