> Logging to ascii means that the standard unix tools work out of the box with your log files.
Check out Jshon, it acts as a bridge between JSON and the standard unix tools. For small files it is faster than cat.
Check out Jshon, it acts as a bridge between JSON and the standard unix tools. For small files it is faster than cat.
https://github.com/dvxhouse/jsonpipe
$ echo '{"a": 1, "b": 2}' | jsonpipe
/ {}
/a 1
/b 2
$ echo '["foo", "bar", "baz"]' | jsonpipe
/ []
/0 "foo"
/1 "bar"
/2 "baz"It also seems to handle typical use cases inelegantly. Probably the most common thing I use Jshon for is turning json into a tab deliminated text file. To compare both, here is a query that returns json search results:
curl -s "https://aur.archlinux.org/rpc.php?type=search&arg=python"
jshon -e results -a -e Name -u -p -e Version -u -p -e NumVotes -u -p -e Description -u | \
sed 's/^$/-/' | paste -s -d "\t\t\t\n"
jsonpipe | grep -e '^results/[0-9]*/(Name|Version|NumVotes|Description)\t' > matches.tmp
grep 'Name\t' matches.tmp | cut -f 2 > name.tmp
grep 'Version\t' matches.tmp | cut -f 2 > version.tmp
grep 'NumVotes\t' matches.tmp | cut -f 2 > vote.tmp
grep 'Description\t' matches.tmp | cut -f 2 > desc.tmp
sed -i 's/^$/-/' *.tmp
paste -d '\t\t\t\n' name.tmp version.tmp vote.tmp desc.tmp
rm {name,version,vote,desc}.tmp
The one thing that I do like about jsonpipe is that each line has the fully self contained path. So you can shuffle (or otherwise destroy) the output but still have something with usable context. Except for the example above, where the order matters a lot. For really simple cases jsonpipe's method is nice. I might just port it to C so that there can be a fair comparison.