How to get newline on every iteration in jq

Question

I have the following file

[
  {
    "id": 1,
    "name": "Arthur",
    "age": "21"
  },
  {
    "id": 2,
    "name": "Richard",
    "age": "32"
  }
]

To display login and id together, I am using the following command

$ jq '.[] | .name' test
"Arthur"
"Richard"

But when I put it in a shell script and try to assign it to a variable then the whole output is displayed on a single line like below

#!/bin/bash

names=$(jq '.[] | .name' test)
echo $names

$ ./script.sh
"Arthur" "Richard"

I want to break at every iteration similar to how it works on the command line.

Answer 1

Couple of issues in the information you have provided. The jq filter .[] | .login, .id will not produce the output as you claimed on jq-1.5. For your original JSON

{  
   "login":"dmaxfield",
   "id":7449977
}
{  
   "login":"stackfield",
   "id":2342323
}

It will produce four lines of output as,

jq -r '.login, .id' < json
dmaxfield
7449977
stackfield
2342323

If you are interested in storing them side by side, you need to do variable interpolation as

jq -r '"\(.login), \(.id)"' < json
dmaxfield, 7449977
stackfield, 2342323

And if you feel your output stored in a variable is not working. It is probably because of lack of double-quotes when you tried to print the variable in the shell.

jqOutput=$(jq -r '"\(.login), \(.id)"' < json)
printf "%s\n" "$jqOutput"
dmaxfield, 7449977
stackfield, 2342323

This way the embedded new lines in the command output are not swallowed by the shell.

---

For you updated JSON (totally new one compared to old one), all you need to do is

jqOutput=$(jq -r '.[] | .name' < json)
printf "%s\n" "$jqOutput"
Arthur
Richard