[SOLVED] Why is my shell script splitting my JSON object in the middle of a string?

Issue

I am having problems parsing a JSON file using jq from a .sh script. When the object contains a space, shell splits it into two. Can i escape the space somehow?

From command line:

echo $(jq '.' ../ext/js/language/languages.json) | jq -c '.[1]' returns:

{"iso":"en","language":"English","flag":"🇺🇸🇬🇧","exampleText":"don't read"}

which is what i want (languages.json contains an array of such objects)

From shell:

entries=($(jq -c '.[]' ../ext/js/language/languages.json))
echo "[1] ${entries[1]}"
echo "[2] ${entries[2]}"

[1] {"iso":"en","language":"English","flag":"🇺🇸🇬🇧","exampleText":"don't
[2] read"}

Solution

You could convert each item into a JSON-encoded string using @json, and escape that for shell using @sh. Then, On the shell's side, use declare -a to declare the indexed Bash array.

unset entries
declare -a entries="($(
  jq -r '.[] | @json | @sh' ../ext/js/language/languages.json
))"
echo "[1] ${entries[1]}"

[1] {"iso":"en","language":"English","flag":"🇺🇸🇬🇧","exampleText":"don't read"}

Answered By - pmf

Answer Checked By - Cary Denson (WPSolving Admin)