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@cjus
Created June 26, 2011 17:42
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Extract a JSON value from a BASH script
#!/bin/bash
function jsonval {
temp=`echo $json | sed 's/\\\\\//\//g' | sed 's/[{}]//g' | awk -v k="text" '{n=split($0,a,","); for (i=1; i<=n; i++) print a[i]}' | sed 's/\"\:\"/\|/g' | sed 's/[\,]/ /g' | sed 's/\"//g' | grep -w $prop`
echo ${temp##*|}
}
json=`curl -s -X GET http://twitter.com/users/show/$1.json`
prop='profile_image_url'
picurl=`jsonval`
`curl -s -X GET $picurl -o $1.png`
@joshimanish1986
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@psmanek. I am facing similar issue. my value string contains , and =. Please let me know if you or anyone on this thread were able to resolve this.

@the-lazy-fox
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If my json contains a list of object, how can I extract 2 properties of each object?
Want to use one depending of the second one for each object.
Thanks!

@rkewlani
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nice. works very well.

@wshbair
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wshbair commented Mar 11, 2019

Great it works very well with adding --silent option in curl

@flinox
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flinox commented Apr 3, 2019

it works! tkz, great job!

@hilmarf
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hilmarf commented Sep 2, 2019

{ "array": [ "foo", "bar" ], "other": "entry", "page": 1 }

what do I need to do, to get 'foo' and 'bar' ?
currently jsonValue array returns only foo

@wsieburgh
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I would advise to use jq, like this : cat file.json | jq .array would give:
[
"foo",
"bar"
]

@Akianonymus
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Small modification to display only one result for our $KEY.

awk -F"[,:}]" '{for(i=1;i<=NF;i++){if($i~/\042'$KEY'\042/){print $(i+1)}}}' | tr -d '"' | sed -e 's/^[[:space:]]*//'

But... How to display whole result if it contains "," or ":" character?

jsonValue()
{
    num=$2
    grep \""$1"\" | sed  "s/\:/\n/"  | grep -v \""$1"\"  | sed "s/\"\,//g"  | sed 's/["]*$//' | sed 's/[,]*$//'| sed 's/^[ \t]*//'  | sed s/\"// | sed -n "${num}"p
}

Functionally same as @itstayyab, but , and : are also handled

Yes, i know, pretty late to the party.

@impressto
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Small modification to display only one result for our $KEY.
awk -F"[,:}]" '{for(i=1;i<=NF;i++){if($i~/\042'$KEY'\042/){print $(i+1)}}}' | tr -d '"' | sed -e 's/^[[:space:]]*//'
But... How to display whole result if it contains "," or ":" character?

jsonValue()
{
    num=$2
    grep \""$1"\" | sed  "s/\:/\n/"  | grep -v \""$1"\"  | sed "s/\"\,//g"  | sed 's/["]*$//' | sed 's/[,]*$//'| sed 's/^[ \t]*//'  | sed s/\"// | sed -n "${num}"p
}

Functionally same as @itstayyab, but , and : are also handled

Yes, i know, pretty late to the party.

Works perfectly. Thanks

@Akianonymus
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Akianonymus commented May 22, 2020

Small modification to display only one result for our $KEY.
awk -F"[,:}]" '{for(i=1;i<=NF;i++){if($i~/\042'$KEY'\042/){print $(i+1)}}}' | tr -d '"' | sed -e 's/^[[:space:]]*//'
But... How to display whole result if it contains "," or ":" character?

jsonValue()
{
    num=$2
    grep \""$1"\" | sed  "s/\:/\n/"  | grep -v \""$1"\"  | sed "s/\"\,//g"  | sed 's/["]*$//' | sed 's/[,]*$//'| sed 's/^[ \t]*//'  | sed s/\"// | sed -n "${num}"p
}

Functionally same as @itstayyab, but , and : are also handled
Yes, i know, pretty late to the party.

Works perfectly. Thanks

Just got the notification, glad it helped you. I have made some improvements since the last time.

###################################################
# Method to extract specified field data from json
# Globals: None
# Arguments: 2
#   ${1} - value of field to fetch from json
#   ${2} - Optional, nth number of value from extracted values, by default shows all.
# Input: file | here string | pipe
#   _json_value "Arguments" < file
#   _json_value "Arguments <<< "${varibale}"
#   echo something | _json_value "Arguments"
# Result: print extracted value
###################################################
_json_value() {
    declare LC_ALL=C num="${2:-}"
    grep -o "\"""${1}""\"\:.*" | sed -e "s/.*\"""${1}""\": //" -e 's/[",]*$//' -e 's/["]*$//' -e 's/[,]*$//' -e "s/\"//" -n -e "${num}"p
}

To avoid forking of multiple sed processes

@itstayyab
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Got my, mentioned after 6 years :) Glad that I contributed to something.

@grndvl1
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grndvl1 commented Sep 22, 2020

Awesome bit of code. Thank you saved me a ton of time and frustrations. Why there is no string compare like a contains just baffles me. The heavy handed use of grep is so silly. All I wanted was a simple if (something.contains(this)); then this allows me to achieve this by parsing the JSON response and then very easily create the if statement. Thank you! You are a time saver!

@thdoan
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thdoan commented Apr 1, 2021

Given this JSON in data.json:

{
  "id": "001",
  "color": "blue"
}

And I want to extract value "blue" from JSON property color in Windows git bash (no jq dependency), here's how I do it in a pinch:

grep color data.json | cut -d'"' -f4

Another way to do it:
https://raymii.org/s/snippets/Get_json_value_with_sed.html

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