JQ adds single quotes while saving in environment variables

Question

OK, this might be a silly question. I've got the test.json file:

{
    "timestamp": 1234567890,
    "report": "AgeReport"
}

What I want to do is to extract timestamp and report values and store them in some env variables:

export $(cat test.json | jq -r '@sh "TIMESTAMP=\(.timestamp) REPORT=\(.report)"')

and the result is:

echo $TIMESTAMP $REPORT
1234567890 'AgeReport'

The problem is that those single quotes break other commands. How can I get rid of those single quotes?

NOTE: I'm gonna leave the accepted answer as is, but see @Inian's answer for a better solution.

Answer 1

Why make it convoluted with using eval and have a quoting mess? Rather simply emit the variables by joining them with NULL (\u0000) and read it back in the shell environment

{
  IFS= read -r -d '' TIMESTAMP 
  IFS= read -r -d '' REPORT
} < <(jq -r '(.timestamp|tostring) + "\u0000" + .report + "\u0000"' test.json)

This makes your parsing more robust by making the fields joined by NULL delimiter, which can't be part of your string sequence.