Why won't jsontool parse my array?

Question

I'm having trouble parsing this json, which contains an array as its outermost element:

response=[ { "__type": "File", "name": "...tfss-ea51ec70-d3a8-45e5-abbf-294f2c2c81f0-myPicture.jpg", "url": "http://files.parse.com/ac3f079b-cacb-49e9-bd74-8325f993f308/...tfss-ea51ec70-d3a8-45e5-abbf-294f2c2c81f0-myPicture.jpg" } ]

for blob in $response
do
    url=$(echo $blob | json url)
done

But this last json parsing gives a bunch of errors:

json: error: input is not JSON: Bad object at line 2, column 1:

    ^

Do I need to do something special to turn a JSON array into a bash array, or vice versa?

Please provide a runnable example that demonstrates your error. — chepner
– chepner, Commented Jul 11, 2014 at 14:34
Is that the string that you're actually injecting to the json tool? Perhaps show the code that generates the response? — konsolebox
– konsolebox, Commented Jul 11, 2014 at 14:48
@chepner edited, should be standalone runnable now and produces the error. — buildsucceeded
– buildsucceeded, Commented Jul 11, 2014 at 22:56

npostavs · Accepted Answer · 2014-07-12 03:10:38Z

3

You should quote the value of reponse to protect it from the shell trying to interpret it:

response='[ { "__type": "File", "name": "...tfss-ea51ec70-d3a8-45e5-abbf-294f2c2c81f0-myPicture.jpg", "url": "http://files.parse.com/ac3f079b-cacb-49e9-bd74-8325f993f308/...tfss-ea51ec70-d3a8-45e5-abbf-294f2c2c81f0-myPicture.jpg" } ]'

And you can't expect the shell to be able to parse JSON, so for blob in $response isn't going to work out. According to http://trentm.com/json/, using -a should handle the array:

while read url ; do
   # use $url here...
done < <(echo "$response" | json -a url)

answered Jul 12, 2014 at 3:10

npostavs

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Comments

Wolph · Accepted Answer · 2014-07-11 14:50:13Z

0

After putting your json in a file and piping it through jsontool it works just fine, so I'm guessing your file has some weird whitespace which is breaking in jsontool.

Try this instead:

cat your_file.json | sed 's/[[:space:]]\+$//' | json

answered Jul 11, 2014 at 14:50

Wolph

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Of course, a proper JSON parser should ignore whitespace.

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