# jq

The command-line JSON processor that turns raw API output into readable, scriptable data.

HTML: https://softbests.com/software/jq
Markdown: https://softbests.com/software/jq.md
Website: https://jqlang.github.io/jq/

- Category: [Terminal](https://softbests.com/category/terminal)
- Pricing: Open source
- Platforms: macOS, Linux, Windows

## Best for

Anyone who pipes JSON through a terminal and is tired of eyeballing minified output.

## Why it deserves attention

jq reads JSON and lets you select, filter, map, and reshape it with a small query language, so a verbose API response becomes a few fields you can diff or loop over. It is a single static binary, works on macOS, Linux, and Windows, and is MIT-licensed with 36,000 GitHub stars. It is also a fixture of shell scripts and CI, which makes it worth learning once. The syntax is terse and takes practice, and it only handles JSON, not YAML or TOML.

## Can replace

- python -m json.tool

## Related and alternatives

- [bat](https://softbests.com/software/bat)
- [ripgrep](https://softbests.com/software/ripgrep)