JQ | Phil (aka MP3Monster)'s Blog

Tags

CLI, development, JQ, JSON, software, Technology, utility

when you’re testing apps, it is pretty common to want to send JSON via CURL to a local endpoint. The problem is that this usually means that the string you provide curl needs to have characters escaped, such as quote marks. By hand, this can be irritating to sort out, particularly if you’re using an IDE to make sure the JSON is correct. I’d concluded this is hardly a new problem; someone must have produced a nice little multiple-platform command line utility that can do it for you. The result was a bit more surprising.

There are plenty of online utils that solve it, but if you’re working with data, you don’t want to publicly share (or the fiddling around with copy-pasting to your browser). Nothing wrong with these tools, but you can’t script them without resorting to RPA (Robotic Process Automation) either. Here are a couple of services I found that are straightforward, and when I’ve tried them, not plagued by annoying ads.

But finding command line tools, well, finding an answer, has proven a bit more challenging. For removing escaped characters, you could use jq, but we actually want to go the other way to use curl with JSON that has been escaped. I have come across conversations covering the use of bash (making use of awk and sed. Plus, details about how the manipulation could be done in various languages (so you could code your own solution if so inclined. Coding is unlikely to take much effort, but testing permutations is going to demand effort).

The one solution I have found that meant I could escape (or reverse) JSON locally is a plugin for VS Code called appropriately JSON-escaper, which does what is needed in a nice and clean manner. All credit to Joshua Poehls for the tool.

The solution JSON-escaper built on top of a more generic JavaScript utility which addresses escaping special characters which can be found here.

Tags

jason, JQ, node.js, npm, parser

We have had a requirement from a customer to be able define every package including dependencies within a Node solution (as it happens Apollo GraphQL), not only the complete download path but the version numbering as well. There are many ways to solve this problem. But here is an elegant(?) and portable answer. To ensure that we don’t get pollution from a global node space we created a project package in an empty folder using:

 npm init --yes

This defaults all the package,json settings which for our requirements is fine. Then in the same location its npm install <product from the npm registry to pull> e.g. for Apollo GraphQL:

npm install apollo-server graphql

This will bring down to your npm project all the dependencies putting them in the node_modules child folder. We’re now in a position to retrieve all the details of the packages, their dependencies and version information. This can be done by using the command: