Flatten nested JSON with jq

Question

I'm trying to flatten some nested JSON with jq. My first attempt was by looping over the JSON in bash with base64 as per this article . It turned out to perform very slowly, so I'm trying to figure out an alternative with just jq.

I have some JSON like this:

[
  {
    "id":117739,
    "officers": "[{\"name\":\"Alice\"},{\"name\":\"Bob\"}]"
  },
  {
    "id":117740,
    "officers":"[{\"name\":\"Charlie\"}]"
  }
]

The officers field holds a string which is JSON too. I'd like to reduce this to:

[
  { "id":117739, "name":"Alice" },
  { "id":117739, "name":"Bob" },
  { "id":117740, "name":"Charlie" }
]

Answer 1

Well the data you're attempting to flatten is itself JSON so you have to parse it using fromjson . Once parsed, you could then generate the new objects.

map({id} + (.officers | fromjson[]))