libxo VS gron

> In FreeBSD, this problem was solved with libxo[0]:

Libxo happens to be in the base system, but it is generally available:

* https://github.com/Juniper/libxo

* https://libxo.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Or make it flexible:

> libxo - A Library for Generating Text, XML, JSON, and HTML Output

* https://github.com/Juniper/libxo/

* https://wiki.freebsd.org/LibXo

Want structure? Ask for JSON or XML and parse. Otherwise it's the regular text output.

Can you trust it? Cli tool output is not exactly stable. I thought that's why libxo exists?

https://github.com/Juniper/libxo

Please consider https://github.com/Juniper/libxo or something even better than that.

That would look a lot like FreeBSD. Many of the FreeBSD userland tools are set up to use the excellent libxo (https://github.com/Juniper/libxo) to allow the user's choice of how things are output.

gron (https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron) to transform it and query and then invert the transformation?

It buffers all of its output statements in memory before writing to stdout:

https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron/blob/master/main.go#L204

Have you tried `gron`?

It converts your nested json into a line by line format which plays better with tools like `grep`

From the project's README:

▶ gron "https://api.github.com/repos/tomnomnom/gron/commits?per_page..." | fgrep "commit.author"

json[0].commit.author = {};

json[0].commit.author.date = "2016-07-02T10:51:21Z";

json[0].commit.author.email = "[email protected]";

json[0].commit.author.name = "Tom Hudson";

https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron

It was suggested to me in HN comments on an article I wrote about `jq`, and I have found myself using it a lot in my day to day workflow

> So all I want is a tool to go from json => line oriented and I will do the rest with the vast library of experience I already have at transformations on the command line.*

The tool for that is likely https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron

If JQ is too much, see GRON &| Miller

gron transforms JSON into discrete assignments to make it easier to grep for what you want https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron

Miller is like awk, sed, cut, join, and sort for data formats such as CSV, TSV, JSON, JSON https://github.com/johnkerl/miller

And jless [1] and gron [2].

This is the first I'm hearing of gron, but adding here for completeness sake. Meanwhile, JSON seems to be becoming a standard for CLI tools. Ideal scenario would be if every CLI tool has a --json flag or something similar, so that jc is not needed anymore.

[1] https://jless.io/

[2] https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron