dotpick

Token-minimal field projection over JSON, YAML, TOML and NDJSON. Select fields by dotpath and emit the smallest valid slice. The anti-jq for agents and scripts: pure projection and format conversion, with no expression language to get wrong.

Why

jq and yq dump whole payloads, speak cryptic error messages, and jq cannot even read YAML or TOML. When you only need three fields out of a 50 KB response, you pay for the other 49 KB. dotpick takes a simple list of dotpaths and returns just those fields, in the format you ask for.

# 50 KB of pod JSON in, one name per line out
kubectl get pods -o json | dotpick '.items[].metadata.name' -o raw

Install

cargo install dotpick

Quickstart

# Smallest sub-document of two fields (structure preserved)
echo '{"metadata":{"name":"web","ns":"prod"},"spec":{"replicas":3}}' \
  | dotpick '.metadata.name,.spec.replicas'
# => {"metadata":{"name":"web"},"spec":{"replicas":3}}

# Just the value, unquoted
dotpick .spec.replicas deploy.yaml -o raw
# => 3

# Flatten to leaf names
dotpick '.metadata.name,.spec.replicas' deploy.yaml --flat
# => {"name":"web","replicas":3}

# Stream array elements as NDJSON
cat pods.json | dotpick '.items[]' -o ndjson
# => {"name":"a"}
#    {"name":"b"}

# Convert formats with the root path
dotpick . config.toml -o yaml

dotpick <paths> [file] is shorthand for dotpick project <paths> [file].

Dotpath grammar

Output shapes

• structured (default): the smallest sub-document that keeps the original nesting.
• --flat: an object keyed by each path's final name.
• -o raw: bare scalar values, one per line (great for shell capture).
• -o ndjson: one compact JSON value per selected match; [] controls granularity (.items[] streams elements, .items[].name streams names).

Object keys are emitted in sorted order for stable, diff-friendly output.

Formats

Input format is auto-detected (or taken from the file extension, or forced with --from json|yaml|toml|ndjson). Output is selected with -o/--output (auto, json, yaml, toml, ndjson, raw); auto is JSON, or NDJSON when the input is NDJSON. --to is an alias for --output. Use --pretty for indented JSON.

Missing fields

By default a missing path is an error with a "nearest existing key" hint:

echo '{"spec":{"replic":3}}' | dotpick .spec.replicas
# stderr: {"error":{"kind":"path_not_found","message":"path .spec.replicas not found; nearest existing: replic", ...}}

Pass --allow-missing to skip absent paths instead.

Exit codes

For agents (clispec)

dotpick follows The CLI Spec: data on stdout, structured error envelopes on the last line of stderr, and a schema subcommand whose output validates against clispec.dev/schema/v0.3.json (checked by the test suite). Every command is marked read-only (mutating: false).

dotpick schema   # machine-readable contract: commands, args, error kinds, exit codes

dotpick is a stateless filter, so the list-oriented principles (pagination, resource conflicts) do not apply; its paths argument is itself the field selector.

License

MIT