Splitting JSON String Array in Bash

Question

What's the easiest way to download and split the contents of

http://code.dlang.org/available

into a string array in Bash?

I then want to use this to provide completion for a bash commnd.

trentm.com/json , github.com/micha/jsawk , stedolan.github.io/jq , stackoverflow.com/questions/10373381/… — user2864740
– user2864740, Commented Sep 12, 2014 at 23:25
Nice, but I would like to, if possible, only use the Bash builtins together with wget/curl for the download. — Nordlöw
– Nordlöw, Commented Sep 12, 2014 at 23:27
using only bash builtins, the answer is that you probably don't want to do that. You can write something that does the job badly, but writing a fully compliant JSON parser -- something which can differentiate escaped quotes from unescaped ones, for instance -- is probably a much larger project than the tool you're thinking of using this for. Moreover, since bash doesn't support nested data structures, if you did go to the effort of writing a fully compliant native parser, it would be of very little use; you couldn't round-trip with it, for instance. — Charles Duffy
– Charles Duffy, Commented Sep 12, 2014 at 23:36
If you're targeting an operating system that has modern bash, it probably also has modern Python, and if it has modern Python, it has a json module. Why not use that to convert the content into something bash can easily process -- like a NUL-delimited list? — Charles Duffy
– Charles Duffy, Commented Sep 12, 2014 at 23:39
Your'e right, I'll go with Python all the way for downloading and parsing. Thanks. — Nordlöw
– Nordlöw, Commented Sep 13, 2014 at 0:04

clt60 · Accepted Answer · 2014-09-13 11:37:41Z

1

Of course, parsing deep JSON strings is a job for an dedicated JSON parser, but some simple cases (like this) is can be reduced to extracting quoted parts from an string and this can be done easily with grep such:

data=($(curl -s 'http://code.dlang.org/available' | grep -oP '[,\s"]+\K.*?(?=")'))
printf "%s\n" ${data[@]}

prints

zeal
arsd
cookbook
...
...
log4d
dvorm
dfl

Ps: It doesn't handles escaped \" but probably in this case it doesn't hurts.

edited Sep 13, 2014 at 11:37

answered Sep 13, 2014 at 11:21

clt60

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