Any chance of adding recursive descent support?

[TomAnthony]

As detailed at https://goessner.net/articles/JsonPath/ - recursive descent allows specifying elements without needing to give their whole path.

The syntax clashes with the JSON Lines syntax, but it could be implemented differently.

It is very helpful for deeply nested elements where it is hard to get a whole path; as a simple example:

{ "something": {
    "anything": {
      "abcdefg": {
          "finally": {
            "important": {
                "secret": "password"
            }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

With recursive descent you could do $..secret and get [ "password"] as the output.

Are there plans, or appetite, to support such a feature?

Thanks!

[tidwall]

I have no plans at this time, but I think it's an interesting idea.

Perhaps using three dots followed by the path.

[tidwall]

I'm closing for now, but please reopen if you further ideas.

[xxxserxxx]

@tidwall closed, because you aren't interested in implementing it, or closed because you would like more input on how it'd be implemented?

XPath, for XML, has wildcard path support with the ancestor() and descendant() (a.k.a. //) axes. It's a pain to do in jq as well, and is (IME) one of the most common operations users would like to do. There's a lot of JSON with deeply nested schemas, and -- unlike XML -- JSON is expected to be, and frequently is, far less restricted in structure.

A real-life use-case is the Linux window manager, i3. i3 has a command-line tool called i3-msg with which users can dump out a JSON representation of the desktop tree. Because i3 supports containers, the tree can be arbitrarily nested, and windows could be 3 levels deep, or 10 levels deep. A common problem I face when writing scripts is how to find the ID of an arbitrary window that has a certain WM NAME attribute. This is an absurdly difficult problem to solve in jq, and without a path wildcard element, it's almost impossible in jj.

Support for some sort of wildcard syntax (*, ..., %, // -- almost any commonly used wildcard) would be a great addition.

[tidwall]

I just added the @dig modifier:

{ "something": {
    "anything": {
      "abcdefg": {
          "finally": {
            "important": {
                "secret": "password"
            }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

@dig:secret => ["password"]

I hope you find this helpful.