jpath

Find the path of a key / value in a JSON hierarchy easily.

The original name of the project was "JSON Path", but it turned out that there is a specification called like this, so I renamed it to jpath. This project has nothing to do with the JSON path specification.

(It turned out that IBM has a query language called JPath. This project has nothing to do with that.)

Motivation

When working with big and nested JSON files, sometimes it's very difficult to figure out the path of a key. You open the JSON file in a text editor, find the key / value pair you need, but then it can be a pain to get the full path of the key.

Installation

$ go install github.com/jabbalaci/go-jsonpath/cmd/jpath@latest

Example

Consider the following JSON file:

{
    "a": 1,
    "b": {
        "c": 2,
        "friends": [
            {
                "best": "Alice"
            },
            {
                "second": "Bob"
            },
            [5, 6, 7],
            [
                {"one": 1},
                {"two": 2}
            ]
        ]
    }
}

jpath will traverse it recursively and print every path / value pair:

$ jpath samples/short.json
root["a"] => 1
root["b"]["c"] => 2
root["b"]["friends"][0]["best"] => "Alice"
root["b"]["friends"][1]["second"] => "Bob"
root["b"]["friends"][2][0] => 5
root["b"]["friends"][2][1] => 6
root["b"]["friends"][2][2] => 7
root["b"]["friends"][3][0]["one"] => 1
root["b"]["friends"][3][1]["two"] => 2

The idea is to combine its usage with the Unix command grep. For instance, what's the path of the key that leads to Bob?

$ jpath samples/short.json | grep -i bob
root["b"]["friends"][1]["second"] => "Bob"

Then simply paste it in your application (Python example):

>>> import json
>>>
>>> f = open("samples/short.json")
>>> d = json.load(f)
>>> d
{'a': 1, 'b': {'c': 2, 'friends': [{'best': 'Alice'}, {'second': 'Bob'}, [5, 6, 7], [{'one': 1}, {'two': 2}]]}}
>>> d["b"]["friends"][1]["second"]
'Bob'
>>>

Related Works

• JSON-path: my original Python implementation. This project is the same, re-written in Go.
• gron: gron makes JSON greppable. gron can do a lot more than jpath, but when I made jpath I didn't know about gron.