Jq: Strip quotes from strings

[tbelaire]

Let me just explain what task I was trying to accomplish:

I have a file A.json of a dict, and I want to generate a file B.txt,
with one key per line, and no quotation marks around the keys. I get close with

    cat A.json | jq 'keys[]' 

But I had to use cut to drop the leading and trailing quotes from the keys, and that only worked because they were youtube_ids and all the same length.
It would be great if there was a print command in jq that dropped the extra quotes that I don't need.

[nicowilliams]

Is the --raw-output / -r option good enough?

jq --raw-output 'keys[]' A.json

[tbelaire]

Yes, it is. I read the manual, and the tutorial, and didn't find that, so
thanks a ton.

On Fri, Feb 7, 2014 at 3:25 PM, Nico Williams [email protected]:

Is the --raw-output / -r option good enough?

jq --raw-output 'keys[]' A.json

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/stedolan/jq/issues/286#issuecomment-34518439
.

[subfuzion]

Curious why --raw-output isn't the default. If I curl to get the latest tag for a GitHub repo, for example, I don't want it surrounded with quotes. I'm wondering why anyone would by default.

$ curl https://api.github.com/repos/docker/machine/releases/latest | jq -r ".tag_name"
v0.7.0

Such a common kind of thing that I'd rather have a -q option if I really wanted quotes.

[pkoppstein]

@subfuzion - By default, jq expects the input to be JSON, and by default produces JSON as output. That corresponds nicely with the symmetry between the -R and -r options. And the "j" in "jq" is for JSON, after all.