sde

sde is not sed. It's a structured data editor for CLI.

Why?

Many people asked for a simple JSON in-place editing and jq was the solution:

• Modify a key-value in a json using jq in-place
• How to modify a key's value in a JSON file from command line

jq '.address = "abcde"' test.json|sponge test.json

Does this seem readable or elegant to you?

How about this instead:

sde address abcde test.json

sde is not a substitute for jq or sed.

It allows simple in-place JSON/YAML value changes, for structured data.

Sample JSON

{
   "name":"John",
   "age":31,
   "city":"New York",
   "extra": {
       "gender": null
   }
}

Sample YAML

database:
  user: example
  password: secret

Modify data

sde name Jack data.json
sde extra.gender male data.json
sde database.user john data.yml

It is possible to modify data in arrays using a dotted notation. Let's take another sample:

{
    "users": [
        {
            "username": "foo", 
            "enabled": true
        },
        {
            "username": "bar", 
            "enabled": true
        }      
    ],
}

We can set the first user's enabled property to false:

sde users.0.enabled false data.json

Installation for CentOS/RHEL 7, 8 or Amazon Linux 2, or Fedora Linux

sudo yum -y install https://extras.getpagespeed.com/release-latest.rpm
sudo yum -y install sde

Installation for other systems

Installing with pip is easiest:

pip install sde

Notes

Quoting in JSON

Quoting is avoided for null, true, false, and numeric values. To ensure that a given value is quoted, use -s (or --string) option:

sde -s key null file.json

Force-fail on missing keys

If you must edit the file, by ensuring to update only the existing key, use -e (--must-exist) option. The program will exit without adding the key which doesn't exist.

sde -e key val file.json

Force-fail on unchanged file

If the data is unchanged after running sde (values already match), you can force a failure exit code 2 by passing the -m option:

sde -m key sameval file.json
# > exit code 0
sde -m key sameval file.json
# > exit code 2

TODO

Work with stdin

echo $json | sde name Jack

Query simple data

sdg name data.json