Making a curl to an API and get an specific field from the JSON

Question

I'm doing a curl like the following

curl -X GET "https://api.mercadolibre.com/items/MLA511127356"

and the response is a JSON, like for example this one:

"id": "MLA511127356",
  "site_id": "MLA",
  "title": "Item De Testeo, Por Favor No Ofertar --kc:off",
  "subtitle": null,
  "seller_id": "160252486",
  "category_id": "MLA4967",
  "official_store_id": null,
  "price": 10,
  "base_price": 10,
  "original_price": null,
  "currency_id": "ARS",
  "initial_quantity": 16,

Is there a simple way to do this?

Thank you!

possible duplicate of [Parsing json with sed and awk](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1955505/parsing-json-with-sed-and-awk) — Jean-Karim Bockstael, Sep 10 '14 at 16:04

score 15 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 26 '16 at 11:41

15

By using jq you could parse the json data instead of the text based parsing.

curl -X GET "https://api.mercadolibre.com/items/MLA511127356" | jq '.[].id'

answered Sep 26 '16 at 11:41

visibilityspots

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score 10 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:02

10

As mentioned here you can use grep -Po '"keyThatYouWant":.*?[^\\]",' file.json. Like that:

local result=$(curl -X GET $YOUR_HUGE_URL)
echo $result | grep -Po '"keyThatYouWant":.*?[^\\]",'

edited May 23 '17 at 12:02

Community

1
1

answered Jan 18 '16 at 12:55

R. Karlus

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score 9 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 04 '18 at 13:10

9

jq is pretty impressive but if you do not want to install another dependency, using python is a nice alternative by also giving you some extra flexibility if further processing is desired.

Jist of it is to pipe the json curl result to python -c.

Example:

curl -X GET https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/comments/4 | python -c "import sys,json; print json.load(sys.stdin)['email']"

answered Sep 04 '18 at 13:10

Theuns Alberts

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This is almost perfect for my needs. However, I'm at a loss as to why everything has single quotes, and is therefore not valid JSON. When I find an answer to that I'll comment further. Okay, found it: Wrap `json.load(sys.stdn)['email]` with `json.dumps(json.load(sys.stdn)['email])` (this also works with a final out file ` > results.json` - per my own needs) – Neil Gaetano Lindberg Oct 10 '19 at 15:57

Making a curl to an API and get an specific field from the JSON

3 Answers3