Iterating through JSON array in Shell script

Just use a filter that would return each item in the array. Then loop over the results, just make sure you use the compact output option (-c) so each result is put on a single line and is treated as one item in the loop.

jq -c '.[]' input.json | while read i; do    # do stuff with $idone

jq has a shell formatting option: @sh.

You can use the following to format your json data as shell parameters:

cat data.json | jq '. | map([.original_name, .changed_name])' | jq @sh

The output will look like:

"'pdf_convert' 'pdf_convert_1'""'video_encode' 'video_encode_1'","'video_transcode' 'video_transcode_1'"

To process each row, we need to do a couple of things:

• Set the bash for-loop to read the entire row, rather than stopping at the first space (default behavior).
• Strip the enclosing double-quotes off of each row, so each value can be passed as a parameter to the function which processes each row.

To read the entire row on each iteration of the bash for-loop, set the IFS variable, as described in this answer.

To strip off the double-quotes, we'll run it through the bash shell interpreter using xargs:

stripped=$(echo $original | xargs echo)

Putting it all together, we have:

#!/bin/bashfunction processRow() {  original_name=$1  changed_name=$2  # TODO}IFS=$'\n' # Each iteration of the for loop should read until we find an end-of-linefor row in $(cat data.json | jq '. | map([.original_name, .changed_name])' | jq @sh)do  # Run the row through the shell interpreter to remove enclosing double-quotes  stripped=$(echo $row | xargs echo)  # Call our function to process the row  # eval must be used to interpret the spaces in $stripped as separating arguments  eval processRow $strippeddoneunset IFS # Return IFS to its original value

By leveraging the power of Bash arrays, you can do something like:

# read each item in the JSON array to an item in the Bash arrayreadarray -t my_array < <(jq -c '.[]' input.json)# iterate through the Bash arrayfor item in "${my_array[@]}"; do  original_name=$(jq '.original_name' <<< "$item")  changed_name=$(jq '.changed_name' <<< "$item")  # do your stuffdone