---
headline: jq 1.3 Manual
history: |
*The manual for the development version of jq can be found
[here](/jq/manual).*
body: |
A jq program is a "filter": it takes an input, and produces an
output. There are a lot of builtin filters for extracting a
particular field of an object, or converting a number to a string,
or various other standard tasks.
Filters can be combined in various ways - you can pipe the output of
one filter into another filter, or collect the output of a filter
into an array.
Some filters produce multiple results, for instance there's one that
produces all the elements of its input array. Piping that filter
into a second runs the second filter for each element of the
array. Generally, things that would be done with loops and iteration
in other languages are just done by gluing filters together in jq.
It's important to remember that every filter has an input and an
output. Even literals like "hello" or 42 are filters - they take an
input but always produce the same literal as output. Operations that
combine two filters, like addition, generally feed the same input to
both and combine the results. So, you can implement an averaging
filter as `add / length` - feeding the input array both to the `add`
filter and the `length` filter and dividing the results.
But that's getting ahead of ourselves. :) Let's start with something
simpler:
manpage_intro: |
jq(1) -- Command-line JSON processor
====================================
## SYNOPSIS
`jq` [<options>...] <filter> [<files>...]
`jq` can transform JSON in various ways, by selecting, iterating,
reducing and otherwise mangling JSON documents. For instance,
running the command `jq 'map(.price) | add'` will take an array of
JSON objects as input and return the sum of their "price" fields.
By default, `jq` reads a stream of JSON objects (whitespace
separated) from `stdin`. One or more <files> may be specified, in
which case `jq` will read input from those instead.
The <options> are described in the [INVOKING JQ] section, they
mostly concern input and output formatting. The <filter> is written
in the jq language and specifies how to transform the input
document.
## FILTERS
manpage_epilogue: |
## BUGS
Presumably. Report them or discuss them at:
https://github.com/stedolan/jq/issues
## AUTHOR
Stephen Dolan `<mu@netsoc.tcd.ie>`
sections:
- title: Invoking jq
body: |
jq filters run on a stream of JSON data. The input to jq is
parsed as a sequence of whitespace-separated JSON values which
are passed through the provided filter one at a time. The
output(s) of the filter are written to standard out, again as a
sequence of whitespace-separated JSON data.
You can affect how jq reads and writes its input and output
using some command-line options:
* `--slurp`/`-s`:
Instead of running the filter for each JSON object in the
input, read the entire input stream into a large array and run
the filter just once.
* `--raw-input`/`-R`:
Don't parse the input as JSON. Instead, each line of text is
passed to the filter as a string. If combined with `--slurp`,
then the entire input is passed to the filter as a single long
string.
* `--null-input`/`-n`:
Don't read any input at all! Instead, the filter is run once
using `null` as the input. This is useful when using jq as a
simple calculator or to construct JSON data from scratch.
* `--compact-output` / `-c`:
By default, jq pretty-prints JSON output. Using this option
will result in more compact output by instead putting each
JSON object on a single line.
* `--color-output` / `-C` and `--monochrome-output` / `-M`:
By default, jq outputs colored JSON if writing to a
terminal. You can force it to produce color even if writing to
a pipe or a file using `-C`, and disable color with `-M`.
* `--ascii-output` / `-a`:
jq usually outputs non-ASCII Unicode codepoints as UTF-8, even
if the input specified them as escape sequences (like
"\u03bc"). Using this option, you can force jq to produce pure
ASCII output with every non-ASCII character replaced with the
equivalent escape sequence.
* `--raw-output` / `-r`:
With this option, if the filter's result is a string then it
will be written directly to standard output rather than being
formatted as a JSON string with quotes. This can be useful for
making jq filters talk to non-JSON-based systems.
* `--arg name value`:
This option passes a value to the jq program as a predefined
variable. If you run jq with `--arg foo bar`, then `$foo` is
available in the program and has the value `"bar"`.
- title: Basic filters
entries:
- title: "`.`"
body: |
The absolute simplest (and least interesting) filter
is `.`. This is a filter that takes its input and
produces it unchanged as output.
Since jq by default pretty-prints all output, this trivial
program can be a useful way of formatting JSON output from,
say, `curl`.