mjhjmtu

Declaring JSON in bash is kind of annoying because you have to escape a lot of characters.

Say I have an array like this:

 value1="foo"
 value2="bar"
 arr=("key1" "$value1" "key2" "$value2")

Is there a way to somehow join the array with ":" and "," characters.

The only thing I can think of is a loop where you add the right characters, something like this:

data="";

for i in "$arr[@]"; do
 data="$data"$i""
done

Assuming the array is correct:

echo '['
printf '"%s": "%s",n' "$arr[@]" | sed '$s/,$//'
echo ']'

The sed command removes the comma from the end of the last line.

Then pass this through jq to have it formatted correctly:

 sed '$s/,$//'
 echo ']'
 | jq .

With the given data, this produces

[
 
 "key1": "foo"
 ,
 
 "key2": "bar"
 
]

This will obviously treat all values as strings, which is what they are in the shell as well.

Turns out heredoc might be the best way to declare dynamic JSON, but I didn't know about that technique when developed the following.

This is one solution, use it like so:

join_arry_to_json a b c d
"a":"b","c":"d"

this will only work for strings, not for numbers or booleans.
Now to declare a boolean or a number, you use the ^ symbol:

ql_join_arry_to_json a ^3 b ^true c dog

yields:

"a":3,"b":true,"c":"dog"

the code is here:
https://gist.github.com/ORESoftware/a4e3948b0ce9c22752c759d7e694c9ab