JQ is an amazing tool when it solves your problems but I use it so rarely that it’s hard to remember the syntax.

I’m expanding this page as I do new things in jq, doing them twice just to document them here so hopefully I can learn them in time and not have to look them up.

Select item from a list of objects by a key value in each object

A good example here is the Firefox logins.json file.

cat .mozilla/firefox/XXX.default-release/logins.json | \
  jq '.logins[] | select(.hostname | contains("facebook"))'

Or;

cat .mozilla/firefox/XXX.default-release/logins.json | \
  jq '.logins[] | select(.hostname!="facebook").property'

URL Encode a string

This is great if you’re using complex passwords in login URI’s for example.

printf %s 'string to encode' | jq -sRr @uri