Today I Learned

hashrocket A Hashrocket project

Group Json data by a key

Today I learned how to group by json data by a key using jq. In ruby that's very trivial, it's just about using the group_by method like that:

[
  {name: "John", age: 35},
  {name: "Bob", age: 40},
  {name: "Wally", age: 35}
].group_by{|u| u[:age]}

# {
#   35=>[{:name=>"John", :age=>35}, {:name=>"Wally", :age=>35}],
#   40=>[{:name=>"Bob", :age=>40}]
# }

But using jq I had to break it down to a few steps. So let's say that I have this json:

[
  {"name": "John", "age": 35},
  {"name": "Bob", "age": 40},
  {"name": "Wally", "age": 35}
]

The idea is that we'll call the group_by(.age)[] function to return multiple groups, then I pipe it to create a map with the age as the key. Finally we'll have these bunch of nodes not surounded by an array yet, so I am pipeing to a new jq command to add with slurp:

cat data.json |
  jq 'group_by(.age)[] | {(.[0].age | tostring): [.[] | .]}' |
  jq -s add;

# {
#   "35": [{"name": "John", "age": 35},{"name": "Wally", "age": 35}],
#   "40": [{"name": "Bob", "age": 40}]
# }
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