This release finishes the work started in jaq 1.4 towards making jaq being able to process non-JSON values. In particular, a vast majority the filters in jaq's core library can now process any kind of value that satisfies certain conditions; see the corresponding PR. Currently, this is mostly interesting for people who want to use jaq as an API.

Compilation errors

Since about two months, the compilation of jaq via cargo install jaq failed. This happened because a dependency of jaq called ariadne (responsible for printing compilation errors in jaq) broke semantic versioning. Unfortunately, despite the issue being known upstream, at the time of writing there has been no action towards resolving this problem. This put jaq in an awkward position and was somewhat ironic: the library responsible for reporting compilation errors caused compilation errors.

Eventually, I decided to resolve this problem by replacing ariadne. After having evaluated a number of alternative code span printing libraries, such as miette and codespan-reporting, I wrote a new library called codesnake. Starting from this release, codesnake is in charge for formatting code that is printed during compilation errors in jaq. One direct benefit of this change is that compilation errors are now also colored on the jaq playground.

At this point, I would like to thank @zesterer for having created and maintained ariadne. Without it, the error reporting in jaq would not be close to what it is today.

Smaller changes

This release corrects escaping of special characters in strings; in particular, newlines tabs, and quotes (") were not correctly escaped. For example, for the filter "\n" | tojson, jaq 1.4 yields "\"\n\"", whereas jaq 1.5 yields "\"\\n\"" (the difference being an additional backslash before n). Among others, this shows up in string interpolation ("\(.)"), tostring, and tojson.

Apart from ariadne, this release also removes another dependency, namely colored_json. This makes it possible to print output values without first converting them to a format that colored_json can interpret (serde_json::Value). This should favourably influence the performance of printing output values. In the long run, this will allow to remove jaq's dependency on serde, further contributing to shorter compilation times and smaller binary size.

Furthermore, when using --color never, compilation errors are now also printed without colors (#177).

Full Changelog: https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/compare/v1.4.0...v1.5.0

Work on this release has been sponsored by the NLnet foundation, to whom I would like to express my deep gratitude.

This release brings an exciting new addition: the jaq playground! Unlike its counterpart, the jq playground, the jaq playground runs jq filters on your computer and does not send data to a server to process it there. This makes it also suitable to run filters that yield an infinite number of outputs. For more details, see here.

The other big change is that when jaq is used as a library, you can now use it to process custom types of values. That makes it possible to adapt jaq to process non-JSON data, similarly to fq. See ValT for a description of the functions that every value type has to provide. (Thanks to @wader for providing feedback!)
In this version, the core and standard libraries of jaq (which provide named functions, such as length) still only provide functionality for JSON, but I plan to also change this in the future.

New features

• New command-line options: --indent and --tab by @chutz https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/153
• New filters: indices, index, and rindex by @kklingenberg https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/158 https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/165
• Division of strings (string splitting) https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/167
• Subtraction of arrays https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/164

Smaller changes

• Fall back to regular file loading if memory mapping fails https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/168
• More cleanly handle range(from; upto; 0) https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/170
• Provide binary builds for aarch64-apple-darwin (Apple Silicon) by @amitksingh1490 https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/166
• Make jaq-interpret tests pass on 32-bit platforms by @nekopsykose https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/159
• Add Windows install (Scoop) instructions by @IndyV in https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/171

New Contributors

• @nekopsykose made their first contribution in https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/159
• @amitksingh1490 made their first contribution in https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/166
• @chutz made their first contribution in https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/153
• @IndyV made their first contribution in https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/171

Full Changelog: https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/compare/v1.3.0...v1.4.0

This release makes jaq a lot lazier. In particular, several core filters, such as debug, are now evaluated as late as possible https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/131, and filters passed to path expressions are now also executed lazily https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/150. That means that many filters which did not terminate before now terminate!

Backwards-compatible additions

Thanks go especially to @kklingenberg for implementing several new functionalities!

• Support for recursive object merging via a * b by @kklingenberg https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/130
• Add env filter and $ENV variables by @kklingenberg https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/128
• Extend path syntax to support paths like .a.[] https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/145
• group_by terminates as soon as there is an error https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/129

Breaking Changes

• The last(f) filter now returns no output instead of null when f yields no output. This is to make it consistent with first(f), which has the same behaviour. 51d3f513e6fa2cf41bdf92cd27f7cb45448dd601
• Rename --compact to --compact-output to match jq https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/148
• to_entries and paths now return objects without sorting keys, like jq 484dd270a084ee7e6f233c781f96444264af530b

Eliminated bugs

• Calling jaq without a filter now correctly executes the identity filter https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/147
• Calling jaq with an empty filter ('') now yields an error message instead of crashing, thanks to a new ariadne release --- thanks to @zesterer!
• Processing long sequences with foreach used to crash with a stack overflow at the end, for example when executing foreach limit(1000000; repeat(1)) as $x (0; .+$x). This is now not longer the case. 854d22cadfa4c8fa18d53a658a5da5cb139bbd80

Full Changelog: https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/compare/v1.2.0...v1.3.0

jaq is a jq clone with an emphasis on correctness, speed, and simplicity.

This release brings initial support for tail-recursion optimisation. For example, the filter

def repeat(f): def rec: f, rec; rec; repeat(1)

yielded a stack overflow after several values in jaq before. Now, jaq will actually yield an infinite stream of ones.

As a result, several filters have been rewritten to leverage tail-recursion optimisation, in particular repeat and paths. The filters recurse, while, and until, which previously had to be implemented as native filters, are now implemented by definition, which significantly simplifies the code base.

Furthermore, a few filters are now executed more lazily, including array construction ([...]) and reduce/foreach/for. For example, the filters

def f: 1, [f]; limit(1; f)

and

def f: f; limit(1; foreach (0, f) as $x (1; .))

yielded a stack overflow in jaq before. Now, both just return 1, like jq.

Finally, as cherry on the icing, jaq now implements the range/3 filter and range/2 supports more maximal elements. For example, range(1; 10; 2) yields 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, and range(0; infinite) now yields the (infinite) stream of all natural numbers.

Full Changelog: https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/compare/v1.1.2...v1.2.0

Like jaq 1.1.1, this is a maintenance release without new features.
It decreases the minimal supported Rust version (MSRV) to allow building jaq on Rust versions as low as 1.64 (released Sept. 22, 2022).
Some parts of jaq, like the interpreter and the core library, now build even with Rust 1.63.

jaq 1.1 did not build on Rust 1.62 anymore due to some new versions of dependencies.
Therefore, jaq 1.1.1 downgrades a few dependencies so that it builds at least on Rust 1.65.
This is now automatically verified by a GitHub action.

Apart from this, this release contains no new functionality.

New Contributors

• @mo8it made their first contribution in https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/125

Full Changelog: https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/compare/v1.1.0...v1.1.1

jaq is a jq clone with an emphasis on correctness, speed, and simplicity.

The largest change in jaq 1.1 is the support for filter arguments in recursive filters. This means that you can now write something like:

def repeat(f): f, repeat(f); repeat(1, 2)

However, unlike in jq, this will currently fail with a stack overflow after a certain number of values (about 12,000 on my machine). To address this issue, tail-call optimisation is necessary, which is planned to be supported in jaq 1.2.

Furthermore, several expressions that were evaluated strictly are now evaluated lazily, in particular cartesian products and objects.
That means that some filters that would previously never yield any input, now can yield an infinite number of inputs.

The API of jaq 1.1 is fully backwards compatible with the API of jaq 1.0.

Full Changelog: https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/compare/v1.0.0...v1.1.0

jaq is a jq clone with an emphasis on correctness, speed, and simplicity.

jaq 1.0 brings lots of features compared to the last stable release (0.10).
A short summary with examples:

• Recursive/nested function definitions: def walk(f): def rec: (.[]? |= rec) | f; rec;
• Variable arguments: def foo($v; f): ...
• String interpolation: @uri "https://www.google.com/search?q=\(.search)"
• if-then expressions without else branch: if . < 0 then - . end
• try-catch expressions: try . * 10 catch "NaN"
• Many, many new filters
• Native filter API: allows you to create custom versions of jaq where you can supply your own filters written in Rust
• Automatically built binaries

For more details on these changes, see the alpha, beta, and gamma release information.

Given that this is an 1.0 release, I will try to maintain a stable API.
Among others, future improvements that should be possible within the current API include optimisation of tail recursive calls (for better recursion performance) as well as parallel execution.

Thanks again to all contributors since the last stable release!

Full Changelog: https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/compare/v1.0.0-gamma...v1.0.0

This release brings support for string interpolation, including custom formatters (thanks to @kklingenberg). That means that you can now write something like @uri "https://www.google.com/search?q=\(.search)" and have it interpreted like in jq.
Furthermore, like in the upcoming jq 1.7, else branches in if-then-else expressions can now be omitted.

This version is planned to be the last one before 1.0. No new features are supposed to be integrated into 1.0, only bug fixes.

From this release on, binaries are automatically built. It would be great if someone with an Apple system could test it on their machine.

Smaller changes

• Remove --nul-output flag, following jq https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/108
• Restore sub branching https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/110
• Shrink error type https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/106

Full Changelog: https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/compare/v1.0.0-beta...v1.0.0-gamma

This release includes a large number of new filters, mostly for:

• strings (@baod-rate, https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/84, https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/82),
• arrays (@kklingenberg https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/74),
• dates (@baod-rate, https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/85), and
• math (@kklingenberg, https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/96).

Furthermore, it adds support for the try f catch g syntax (@kklingenberg, https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/100), and strings can now be multiplied with integers to repeat them (@nouritsu, https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/86).

The CLI supports the option --nul-output (@baod-rate, https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/91) and matches jq’s exit code with --exit-status when there is no output (@baod-rate, https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/92).

Under the hood, the API has changed considerably in order to accommodate for the changes implied by native filters. Most notably, the jaq-interpret crate (containing the interpreter, i.e. the heart of jaq) was split off from jaq-core, and the jaq-syn crate (containing only data types for the syntax) was split off from jaq-parse.

Thanks again to @baod-rate and @kklingenberg for their tremendous efforts!

New Contributors

• @baod-rate made their first contribution in https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/80
• @nouritsu made their first contribution in https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/86
• @kklingenberg made their first contribution in https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/74

Full Changelog: https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/compare/v1.0.0-alpha...v1.0.0-beta

This release fixes a critical bug that can occur when binding multiple variables. Furthermore, it uses a newer version of the regex crate to allow for a simpler installation.

Full Changelog: https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/compare/v0.10.0...v0.10.1

This release adds a lot of new features to jaq:

• Recursive & nested functions: see the README for restrictions of recursive functions
• Variable arguments: def foo($v; f): ...
• Variables bound via command-line arguments (--arg) can be referred to from definitions now
• New filters: walk(f), group_by(f), unique, unique_by(f), paths
• Tests (--run-tests)

Thanks are due especially to @passcod for having implemented native filters. Users that use jaq as part of their own programs via the API can now implement filters as Rust functions and expose them to jaq. The API is still subject to change, see https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/70.

Given the extent of these new features, I think that the time is ripe for a 1.0 release.
However, this is an alpha release because especially recursive/nested functions have not yet received the amount of testing that I would expect from a 1.0 release.
As I will be going this week on a cycling trip that will last about two months, I will not be available during this time to address issues myself. However, it is my hope that this time allows users to test the new functions and to report issues (and in the optimal case submit PRs to fix the problems), in order to allow for a more polished 1.0 release later.

New Contributors

• @Shirtpantswallet made their first contribution in https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/65
• @passcod made their first contribution in https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/70

Full Changelog: https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/compare/v0.10.0...v1.0.0-alpha

jaq is a jq clone with a focus on correctness, speed, and simplicity.
jaq 0.10.0 improves JSON parsing speed, supports regular expression filters and walk(f), and improves compatibility of foreach syntax and arguments handling.

Details:

• JSON parsing: This release parses JSON using the new hifijson crate instead of serde_json.
  This increases JSON parsing performance, in one benchmark by up to 87% compared to jaq 0.9.0 and by 68% compared to jq.
• Regular expressions: The filters test, scan, match, capture, splits, sub, gsub are now supported.
  Note that for named capture groups, the syntax (?<name>exp) is not supported when installing jaq by cargo install jaq;
  however, it is supported when installing jaq using cargo build, cargo install --path jaq or cargo install --git https://github.com/01mf02/jaq.
  This is because the underlying crate for parsing regular expressions, regex-syntax, does not support the (?<name>exp) syntax at the time of writing, so jaq currently uses a patched version of this crate, which is however not considered by cargo install jaq. In the future, the (?<name>exp) syntax is likely to be included in regex-syntax, which will make the (?<name>exp) syntax available also when installing jaq via cargo install jaq.
• foreach, for: In jq 0.9, the semantics of foreach xs as $x (init; f) were changed such that it yielded the output of init, unlike jq. Following some discussion, the suggestion by @pkoppstein was implemented that restored the previous semantics of foreach, while introducing a new filter for xs as $x (init; f) that yields the output of init. More information can be found in the README.
• Arguments handling: The --slurpfile and --rawfile options are now supported. Furthermore, arguments (such as passed by --arg a b) are now bound to $ARGS.

New Contributors

• @tshepang made their first contribution in https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/55
• @elkowar made their first contribution in https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/59

Full Changelog: https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/compare/v0.9.0...v0.10.0

This release greatly improves performance of file reading by memory mapping. On one benchmark, for example, this change decreased runtime by about 27%. Pass input files as arguments to profit from this; i.e., use jaq 'filter' file.json instead of jaq 'filter' <file.json.

Several filters now behave more like in jq, for example assignment (=) and arithmetic update-assignment (+=, -=, ...).
Updates using f as $x | g or if f then g else h on the left-hand side are now evaluated correctly if f yields multiple values.
recurse, reduce, and foreach are now evaluated more lazily.

BREAKING CHANGE: foreach xs as $x(init; f) does now also output the outputs of init, and the syntax foreach xs as $x(init; f; proj) is not supported anymore. This makes the behaviour of foreach easier to describe and reason about, greatly simplifies the implementation and makes foreach behave more like reduce. See the README for details.

Users of jaq-core (the library powering jaq) might be happy to know that Filters are now Send and Sync. That means that it is now possible to execute a filter on multiple threads, processing multiple values in parallel. The jaq application itself does not make use of this (yet).

Full Changelog: https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/compare/v0.8.2...v0.9.0

This release adds the --raw-input / -R command-line option to jaq.
This is particularly useful to try the newly included Brainfuck interpreter (based on @itchyny's work) in examples/bf.jq. :)

Under the hood, jaq tries to avoid more clones when destructuring or updating arrays or objects.
For example, this makes [range(1000000) | [.] | .[]] | length about 6% faster.

Furthermore, expressions such as f[], which consist of some filter directly followed by a path, are now evaluated differently.
In particular, f is now evaluated lazily, whereas before, it was evaluated strictly.
This makes it possible to write a Fibonacci sequence generator as

 [0,1] | recurse([.[1], add])[0]

which previously would not have terminated.

Full Changelog: https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/compare/v0.8.1...v0.8.2

The main feature of this release is greatly improved parsing speed (012c9c58a35ee6b41fdca691f74fef5571493074).

Apart from this, there are three new filters suggested by @pkoppstein, namely debug, finites, and normals.
Furthermore, the performance of join has increased vastly.
Last but not least, the command-line interface has been updated to use Clap 4.

Full Changelog: https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/compare/v0.8.0...v0.8.1

What's Changed

The largest addition in this release is support for complex assignments: Previously, the left-hand side of assignments in jaq were restricted to simple path expressions, such as .[], .a. Now, jaq also supports assignments with more general left-hand sides, such as if .. then .. else .. end, recurse(..) and several others. This enables filters such as (.posts[] | select(.author == "stedolan") | .comments) |= . + ["terrible."] (taken from the jq manual --- I do not have such strong feelings towards Stephen Dolan's posts ^^).

This release also adds support for several new filters:

• inputs, input: These filters make it now possible to process input lazily with state. This effectively makes jaq an impure programming language --- but impurity is restricted to modifying the stream of input values.
• foreach xs as $x (init; update): This is a powerful tool, in particular in conjunction with inputs. For example, foreach inputs as $x (null; .+$x) builds a cumulative sum of the input elements, lazily.
• ..: shorthand for recurse(.[]?)
• while, until: thanks to @capezotte

Smaller changes include:

• Configurable color usage via --color
• Escaped characters in strings: It is now possible to write something like "\"".
• Increased compatibility with jq: thanks to @itchyny for finding several places where jq and jaq diverged
• Homebrew installation, thanks to @chenrui333

Full Changelog: https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/compare/v0.7.0...v0.8.0

What's Changed

This version adds a bunch of new command-line options:

• -c / --compact: output JSON compactly (thanks to @alex-ozdemir!)
• -i / --in-place: replace input files by their output
• --arg: set contents of variables from the command-line
• JSON input files can be passed as arguments

Furthermore, the try operator (?) is now supported. In a nutshell, f? yields those values for which f does not return an error.

New Contributors

• @sanpii made their first contribution in https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/8
• @alex-ozdemir made their first contribution in https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/pull/9

Full Changelog: https://github.com/01mf02/jaq/compare/v0.6.0...v0.7.0