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The words you’re looking for are SAX-like JSON parser or streaming json parser. I don’t know if there’s any command line tools like the one you wrote that use it though to provide a jq-like interface.

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I tried JQ and other command line tools, all were extremely slow and seemed to always parse the entire file.

My parser just reads the file byte by byte until it finds the target, then outputs the content. When that's done it stops reading the file, meaning that it can be extremely fast when the targeted information is at the beginning of the JSON file.

You're still describing a SAX parser (i.e. streaming). jq doesn't use a SAX parser because it's a multi-pass document editor at its core, hence why I said "jq-like" in terms of supporting a similar syntax for single-pass queries. If you used RapidJSON's SAX parser in the body of your custom code (returning false once you found what you're looking for), I'm pretty sure it would significantly outperform your custom hand-rolled code. Of course, your custom code is very small with no external dependencies and presumably fast enough, so tradeoffs.

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