Diem: [Feature Request] Option to output JSON from client CLI

[T-Spoon]

🚀 Feature Request

Allow the client CLI to output JSON.

Right now, the client outputs the data in a misc format (I assume it's the Rust debug object format).

For example:

q as 0e08fa43f3394a96d86554666415441ce726fff24606449d5639471704a1e31a

produces:

>> Getting latest account state
Latest account state is:
 Account: 0e08fa43f3394a96d86554666415441ce726fff24606449d5639471704a1e31a
 State: Some(
    AccountStateBlob {
     Raw: 0x010000002100000001217da6c6b3e19f1825cfb2676daecce3bf3de03cf26647c78df00b371b25cc9744000000200000000e08fa43f3394a96d86554666415441ce726fff24606449d5639471704a1e31a0094357700000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
     Decoded: Ok(
        AccountResource {
            balance: 2000000000,
            sequence_number: 0,
            authentication_key: 0x0e08fa43f3394a96d86554666415441ce726fff24606449d5639471704a1e31a,
            sent_events_count: 0,
            received_events_count: 0,
        },
    )
     },
)

Whereas the JSON output would look something like:

{
  "Account": "0e08fa43f3394a96d86554666415441ce726fff24606449d5639471704a1e31a",
  "State": {
    "Raw": "0x010000002100000001217da6c6b3e19f1825cfb2676daecce3bf3de03cf26647c78df00b371b25cc9744000000200000000e08fa43f3394a96d86554666415441ce726fff24606449d5639471704a1e31a0094357700000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000",
    "Decoded": {
      "balance": 2000000000
      ....
    }
  }
}

It doesn't need to be super clean for V1 I think - just valid JSON!

Motivation

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
This would make it much easier to build out the ecosystem. For example, https://libranaut.io/ is is pulling data by piping through the CLI, and regex parsing the results. This is obviously highly prone to breaking in unexpected ways, and much more work than just parsing JSON.

I think providing the JSON output option is probably a quick win to help the dev community bootstrap the ecosystem.

Pitch

Describe the solution you'd like
A --json flag when booting the CLI (or maybe even a --format json option, to allow other formats in future)

Describe alternatives you've considered

• Regex parsing the current output.
• Reimplement the RPC protocol in each language - this will come eventually. But it's a lot more work. For getting the dev community up and running quickly - piping into the Rust CLI lowers the barrier a lot!

[Kixunil]

It seems to me that #83 fixes this as well - I'm getting JSON responses from the client.

[davidiw]

Seems this has been addressed?