jqlang/jq

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_license

Adoption not part of the score

35488 stars · 1826 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

jq is a lightweight command-line JSON processor written in portable C with zero runtime dependencies. It lets users slice, filter, map, and transform structured JSON data using a concise expression language, akin to sed/awk/grep for JSON.

Use cases

• extract a field from a file from the command line
• pretty-print and format output
• filter and transform api responses in shell scripts
• convert to csv or other formats
• query nested structures with a filter expression
• process logs in a unix pipeline

When to choose

• you need to parse, query, or transform JSON in shell scripts or pipelines
• you want a single dependency-free binary that runs anywhere
• you need fast, scriptable JSON manipulation without writing a program

When to avoid

• you need to process large non-JSON data formats like YAML or XML natively
• you prefer doing JSON manipulation inside a full programming language with existing libraries
• you need a GUI or interactive JSON viewer

Facets

cli-tool · maturity stable

parser serialization cli developer-tools developer-tools files apis cli windows cross-platform -processor -query data-transformation sed-for- command-line linux macos docker

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="jqlang/jq")