Convert a JSON array to a bash array of strings

Question

How do I parse a json array of objects to a bash array with those objects as strings?

I am trying to do the following:

CONVO=$(get_json_array | jq '.[]')
for CONVERSATION in $CONVERSATIONS
do
    echo "${CONVERSATION}"
done

But the echo prints out lines instead of the specific objects. The format of the object is:

{ "key1":"value1", "key2": "value2"}

and I need to pass it to an api:

api_call '{ "key1":"value1", "key2": "value2"}'

Answer 1

The problem is that jq is still just outputting lines of text; you can't necessarily preserve each array element as a single unit. That said, as long as a newline is not a valid character in any object, you can still output each object on a separate line.

get_json_array | jq -c '.[]' | while read object; do
    api_call "$object"
done

Under that assumption, you could use the readarray command in bash 4 to build an array:

readarray -t conversations < <(get_json_array | jq -c '.[]')
for conversation in "${conversations[@]}"; do
    api_call "$conversation"
done