Accessing a JSON object in Bash - associative array / list / another model

Question

I have a Bash script which gets data in JSON, I want to be able to convert the JSON into an accessible structure - array / list / or other model which would be easy to parse the nested data.

Example:

{   "SALUTATION": "Hello world",   "SOMETHING": "bla bla bla Mr. Freeman" } 

I want to get the value like the following: echo ${arr[SOMETHING]}

[ Different approach is optional as well. ]

Answer 1

If you want key and value, and based on How do i convert a json object to key=value format in JQ, you can do:

$ jq -r "to_entries|map(\"\(.key)=\(.value|tostring)\")|.[]" file SALUTATION=Hello world SOMETHING=bla bla bla Mr. Freeman 

In a more general way, you can store the values into an array myarray[key] = value like this, just by providing jq to the while with the while ... do; ... done < <(command) syntax:

declare -A myarray while IFS="=" read -r key value do     myarray[$key]="$value" done < <(jq -r 'to_entries|map("(.key)=(.value)")|.[]' file) 

And then you can loop through the values like this:

for key in "${!myarray[@]}" do     echo "$key = ${myarray[$key]}" done 

For this given input, it returns:

SALUTATION = Hello world SOMETHING = bla bla bla Mr. Freeman