Like: printing all but one column somewhere in the middle. It turns into long, long commands that really pull away from the spirit of fast fabrication unix experimentation.

jq and sql both have the same problem :)

Yes, shell is definitely too weak to parse JSON!

(One reason I started https://oils.pub is because I saw that bash completion scripts try to parse bash in bash, which is an even worse idea than trying to parse JSON in bash)

I'd argue that Awk is ALSO too weak to parse JSON

The following code assumes that it will be fed valid JSON. It has some basic validation as a function of the parsing and will most likely throw an error if it encounters something strange, but there are no guarantees beyond that.

Yeah I don't like that! If you don't reject invalid input, you're not really parsing

---

OSH and YSH both have JSON built-in, and they have the hierarchical/recursive data structures you need for the common Python/JS-like API:

    osh-0.33$ var d = { date: $(date --iso-8601) }

    osh-0.33$ json write (d) | tee tmp.txt
    {
      "date": "2025-06-28"
    }

    $ cat tmp.txt | json read (&x)

    osh-0.33$ = x
    (Dict)  {date: '2025-06-28'}

    osh-0.33$ sed 's/"/bad/"' tmp.txt | json read (&x)
    sed: -e expression #1, char 9: unknown option to `s'
      sed 's/"/bad/"' tmp.txt | json read (&x)
                                     ^~~~
    [ interactive ]:20: json read: Unexpected EOF while parsing JSON (line 1, offset 0-0: '')

Another example from wezm yesterday: https://mastodon.decentralised.social/@wezm/1147586026608361...

YSH has JSON natively, but for anyone interested, it would be fun to test out the language by writing a JSON parser in YSH

It's fundamentally more powerful than shell and awk because it has garbage-collected data structures - https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2024/09/gc.html

Also, OSH is now FASTER than bash, in both computation and I/O. This is despite garbage collection, and despite being written in typed Python! I hope to publish a post about these recent improvements