json.lua VS jq

One option might be to look at the Path of Building “Data” folder. If you need them in another format (e.g. json), it wouldn’t be that hard to write a Lua script to export them in your preferred format (using this json library, for example.

If you don't want to reinvent the wheels, you might want a json encoder to transform data into strings and back. Or bitser if you want better performance and smaller files in exchange for human-readability.

Honestly, I just went with JSON because there's a nice Lua library for it (thank you https://github.com/rxi/json.lua).

I haven't thought about the file format much so far, just the experience of writing in it as if it's the "ground truth". We all seldom open our text files in a hex editor.

JSON https://github.com/rxi/json.lua

Get json.lua from here. Put it in your project directory alongside file1.lua.

Good point. How about this? It allows you to encode/decode Lua values into/from JSON.

I like this json library and tend to use it for save files (also makes them easy to edit by hand while debugging). It gets angry if you use tables with a mix of string and numerical keys, but I'd advise against that anyway. I've also used binser, which is also effective and easy to use.

lua json module can be found from here: https://github.com/rxi/json.lua

That should recursively list directories, counting only the files within each, and output² jsonl that can be further mangled within the shell². You could just as easily populate an associative array for further work, or $whatever. Unlike bash, zsh has reasonable behaviour around quoting and whitespace too.

¹ https://zsh.sourceforge.io/Doc/Release/User-Contributions.ht...

² https://github.com/jpmens/jo

³ https://github.com/stedolan/jq

What I miss from jq and what is implemented but unreleased is platform independent line delimiters.

jq on Windows produces \r\n terminated lines which can be annoying when used with Cygwin / MSYS2 / WSL. The '--binary' option to not convert line delimiters is one of those pending improvements.

https://github.com/stedolan/jq/commit/0dab2b18d73e561f511801...

If you have jq installed you can use it to make the output look nicer.

It requires jq for JSON processing and GNU parallel for concurrent searches in the notebooks.

jq is your friend.

The jq command (https://stedolan.github.io/jq/) is useful pulling that information out.