I’m happy to announce that jpt, the JSON power tool, has been updated to 1.0 and is available on my GitHub Releases page! It’s been over a year since the last release and I’ve been of working on, learning, and pondering what a really useful JSON tool could be and then working like heck to make it a reality.
jpt is a command line utility for formatting, querying, and modifying JSON. It can run on any version of macOS and most any Unix/Linux with jsc (JavaScriptCore) installed, otherwise it’s dependency free! For systems administrators and MacAdmins who need first class JSON tooling in their own shell scripts it can be embedded as a shell function in either bash or zsh. jpt was built to stand the test of time, needing only jsc and a shell, it will work on the newest macOS all the way back to OS X 10.4 Tiger!
There’s a year’s worth of bug fixes, improvements, and new features, let’s take a look at some of them.
Notable Features and Improvement
• jpt can now input and output multi-JSON documents like JSON Text Sequences (RFC 7464) plus other non-standard formats like NDJSON and JSON Lines and concatenated JSON. See: jpt 1.0 can deal with multiple JSON texts
• Truncated JSON can be de detected in concatenated/lines JSON and repaired by closing up open strings, arrays and objects. See: Helping truncated JSON data with jpt 1.0
• jpt can now fully rehabilitate JSON5 back to standard JSON. As I learned last year, there’s more mutant JSON than I realized! See: jpt 1.0 and JSON5 rehab
• jpt can query JSON using both JSON Pointer, IETF RFC 6901 and JSONPath, a nascent draft RFC with powerful recursive search and filtering features.
• jpt can manipulate JSON using JSONPatch, JSON Merge Patch, and some new merge modes not found anywhere else. See: merging JSON objects with jpt 1.0
• shell scripters and programmers may find it useful that jpt has extensive string and number encoding capabilities. From classic encodings like hex, octal, and binary to more recent ones like URL/”percent” encoding and Unicode code points. See: jpt 1.0 text encoding fun
• Need help finding visualizing JSON in new ways? jpt can output the structure of JSON in ways not seen, like JSONPath Object Literals which are simply the JSONPath, an equal sign, and the JSON value (e.g. $.ok="got it"). This simple and powerful declarative syntax can help find the exact path to a particular value and can also be used to quickly prototype a JSON object. See: jpt: see JSON differently
Try it out
There’s a lot to explore in jpt 1.0, download it from my GitHub with a macOS installer package in the Releases page. Check out my other jpt blog entries here at brunerd. As the IETF JSONPath standard takes shape I’ll be updating jpt to accomodate that standard. Until then, I hope this tool helps you in your JSON work, play, or research!