Terminal: CURL | walk to JsonPath | prettyprint JSON

Question

I am looking for a possibility to print parts of a returned JSON document on the shell.

Right now, I am piping a HTTP response from cURL to python to prettyprint it:

curl -vX GET http://foo.bar | python -mjson.tool

But now I would like to know how I could actually "walk" the path to a subarray?

If was for example the returned JSON data:

{
"value1": true,
"value2": {
            "subvalue1": "foo",
            "subvalue2": "bar"
          }
}

How could I only print the subarray in this example?

Answer 1

Terry Jones wrote a nice tool for doing exactly this a few months ago. Here's his blog post about it http://blogs.fluidinfo.com/terry/2010/11/25/jsongrep-py-python-for-extracting-pieces-of-json-objects/.

Basically, for your example you would run

curl -vX GET http://foo.bar | jsongrep.py value2

By the way, I don't think your example is actually valid JSON. The subarray (actually a sub-object in JSON terms) should just be

{
   "subvalue1": "foo",
   "subvalue2": "bar"
}