How to filter keys by name, then access nested object using jq

Question

Novice jq user here, struggling with the following:

I have the following json and need to filter keys based on a keyword and print out the whole object (not just the key) or certain key/value pairs. Note the nested object structure of the JSON, which is intentional.

{
  "timers": {
    "timerWithAKeywordAPlusBlah": {
      "count": 1,
      "max": 0,
      "min": 0      
    },
    "timerWithAKeywordB": {
      "count": 2,
      "max": 0
    },
    "timerWithAKeywordAPlusBlahBlah": {
      "count": 2385,
      "max": 2,
      "min": 1         
    }
  }
}

Desired output:

"timerWithAKeywordAPlusBlah": {
  "count": 1,
  "max": 0,
  "min": 0
},
"timerWithAKeywordAPlusBlahBlah": {
  "count": 2385,
  "max": 2,
  "min": 1
}

Things I tried:

I can print out the key name, but can't figure out how to access the whole object.

cat timers.json| jq '.timers | keys[] | select(contains("KeywordA")) '

Answer 1

In this response, I'm going to assume that you want the output to be valid JSON. If you want the output to be in some other form, you can simply tack on some additional filters.

Anyway, the trick is to select the objects, not the keys, like so:

.timers
| with_entries( select(.key|contains("KeywordA") ) )

With your (modified) input, this produces:

{
  "timerWithAKeywordAPlusBlah": {
    "count": 1,
    "max": 0,
    "min": 0
  },
  "timerWithAKeywordAPlusBlahBlah": {
    "count": 2385,
    "max": 2,
    "min": 1
  }
}

You can then extract whatever details are ultimately required.