Cear output from rest api with jq - rest

Question

I am wanting to be able to use rest API and am discouraged about the barely readable json output. Can jq format json into a simpler more clear data. If JQ does not do this does anyone know of a tool that would Make Rest API more readable to humans?

Answer 1

There are many tools that will allow you to "pretty-print" JSON to make it easier to read. In the case of jq, simply presenting the JSON to jq . (e.g. curl ... | jq .) will pretty-print it, unless it is ridiculously large (i.e., too large to fit into the computer's memory), in which case you probably won't want to pretty-print it anyway.
If the issue is that even pretty-printing the JSON is insufficient to make it comprehensible, then you might find a simple "schema inference engine" appropriate. The one I wrote at https://gist.github.com/pkoppstein/a5abb4ebef3b0f72a6ed (schema.jq) produces an easy-to-understand structural schema. Examples, including examples of how to invoke it, are available at https://github.com/stedolan/jq/wiki/X---Experimental-Benchmarks
The simplest way to use it with curl would be to download it as schema.jq, uncomment the very last line, and then invoke it along the following lines:
curl .... | jq -f schema.jq
E.g.:
curl -Ss https://gitlab.cern.ch/slac_sandbox/ubjson/-/raw/504d419d3e6a4ab87488fcc750bb79c6f5471491/benchmarks/files/jeopardy/jeopardy.json |
jq --arg nullable true -f schema.jq
{
"air_date": "string",
"answer": "string",
"category": "string",
"question": "string",
"round": "string",
"show_number": "string",
"value": "string"
}