Using jq in an Observable notebook#

I use the jq language quite a lot these days, mainly because I can get ChatGPT to write little JSON transformation programs for me very quickly.

I just figured out how to run jq in an Observable notebook.

The key is the jq-web npm package, which provides an Emscripten-compiled version of jq itself.

You can load that in an Observable notebook with this cell:

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jq = require("jq-web")

Now you can use the jq.json(data, jqScript) function to run a conversion against some data.

Here’s a simple example from the jq-web documentation:

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jq.json({
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  a: {
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    big: {
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      json: [
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        'full',
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        'of',
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        'important',
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        'things'
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      ]
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    }
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  }
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}, '.a.big.json | ["empty", .[1], "useless", .[3]] | join(" ")')

I tend to want to run recipes against data from an Observable textarea - so I add a cell like this:

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viewof input = Inputs.textarea({
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  placeholder: "Paste JSON here"
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})

Then I can run a jq recipe like it and assign the result to a variable:

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output = jq.json(JSON.parse(input), '.my.jq.program.here');

I can display that output like so:

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html`<h2>Output:</h2>
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<textarea style="width: 80%; height: 20em">${JSON.stringify(
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  output,
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  null,
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  2
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)}</textarea>

Here’s an example of a notebook I created using jq-web.