Convert string to json in jq

Question

Background

I have a json file that contains a string of json within an object:

{     "requestType": "POST",     "response": {         "size": 78,         "text": "{\"recordID\":123, \"title\":\"Hello World\", \"content\":\"Lorem ipsum...\"}"     } } 

I need to interperet the contents of the .response.text string as json using the json command line interpereter, jq.

When I run this command:

jq '.response.text | @json' 

Output: "\"{\\\"recordID\\\":123, \\\"title\\\":\\\"Hello World\\\", \\\"content\\\":\\\"Lorem ipsum...\\\"}\""

I get some weird escaped json string instead of json that I can access via something like this: .response.text | @json | .recordID.

I realize that the @json function will take json and output a json escaped string, so there must be another way, but @text doesn't seem to do anything.

Question

Is there some way to convert a string of escaped json to actual json that I can parse with a command such as this: jq '.response.text | @json | .title' and get this output: "Hello World"?

Answer 1

Use fromjson.

It parses a string to its appropriate json value. tojson (and @json) goes the other way around and takes a json value and converts it to a string.

So you could do this:

.response.text | fromjson.title