Programming By Stealth

In this very meaty episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots teaches us how to build data structures using jq with JSON files. We're not just querying existing data, we're rebuilding the data the way we want to see it. We learn how to build strings with interpolation, which I find is a very odd word to describe the process. It's really like concatenation in Excel, but maybe that's just me. We build arrays using jq, and even convert between strings and arrays with the `split` and `join` commands. We build dictionaries in a syntax that is simple and elegant. We also build dictionaries from strings using `capture` with Regular Expressions. We learn not to do string formatting and escaping using `@` – for example `@csv` can automatically create comma-separated values data for us and @uri can escape characters for us in a URL we build using jq. Like I said, it's a meaty episode but Bart and I both enjoyed the lesson quite a bit. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net. And