--get-X option order is ignored

[ghost]

i'm using a command like this:

youtube-dl --playlist-end=N --get-id --get-title --get-url https://youtube.com/user/USERNAME

there are three --get-X options and so youtube-dl outputs three lines per video. but the order of these lines seems predefined and doesn't depend on the order of the options. and this predefined order isn't mentioned in the docs so i can't count on it staying the same.

[phihag]

Indeed, the only reason why we allow multiple --get-* options in the first place is that we have no explicit code that forbids them. If you want to extract multiple fields and handle them in another application, use the -j option to output a multitude of keys as a single JSON line instead.

[ghost]

actually one-value-per-line output is much easier to handle in bash and other languages that don't have built-in json support. that's why i didn't use -j.

[jaimeMF]

You can use jq for that:

$ youtube-dl 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaW_jenozKc' -j | jq -r '[.id, .title] | join("\n")'
BaW_jenozKc
youtube-dl test video "'/\ä

[ghost]

jq is an additional dependency which is completely avoidable. KISS, right? you even mention this in your readme:

youtube-dl makes the best effort to be a good command-line program, and thus should be callable from any programming language. If you encounter any problems parsing its output, feel free to create a report.

from the point of view of bash a good command-line program would output one value per line or a list of whitespace (tab?) separated values as a single line. also JSON-serialization/deserialization is less efficient.