JSON Strip Comments

This is a very simple command that will remove comments from JSON files.

Strictly speaking this could be used on any text file not just JSON, however the project's goal and logic is centered around JSON files.

Removes c style comments from a json file
Usage: json-strip-comments [--output OUTPUT] [--empty] [FILENAME]

Positional arguments:
  FILENAME

Options:
  --output OUTPUT, -o OUTPUT
                         Output to given filename instead of stdout
  --empty, -e            Remove empty lines after comment removals
  --help, -h             display this help and exit

Caveats

Due to the simplicity of this project, only comments with whitespace preceeding them will be removed. This prevents removing false positive comments from the inside of a json string for example.

// this comment will be removed
{
  // and this one too
  "id": 1,
  /* and so will this */
  "name": "Bobby Tables",
  /*
  Multi line comments are removed as well \o/
  */
  "email": "user@example.com", // however, this comment will NOT be removed
  "enabled": true /* and neither would this one */
}

Usage Examples

Piping stdin

cat somefile.jsonc | json-strip-comments

Removing empty lines

cat somefile.jsonc | json-strip-comments -e

Specify an input file

json-strip-comments -e something.jsonc

Specify an output file

cat input.jsonc | json-strip-comments -e -o "output.json"
# or
json-strip-comments -e -o "output.json" "input.jsonc"

Using wildcards in output filename

This only workls when using the incoming filename

json-strip-comments -e -o "[folder][file].json" "/path/to/input.jsonc"
# writes to: /path/to/input.json

Perform on all files in current folder

This involves a bit of bash magic, it looks for all .jsonc files and writes .json files with the same name in the same place.

find ./ -type f -name "*.jsonc" -exec json-strip-comments -e -o "[folder][file].json" "{}" \;

Install

Centos

RPM hosted on yum.jc21.com

Go Install

go install github.com/jc21/json-strip-comments@latest

Building

git clone https://github.com/jc21/json-strip-comments && cd json-strip-comments
go build -o bin/json-strip-comments cmd/json-strip-comments/main.go
./bin/json-strip-comments -h