Convert invalid json into valid one in bash

Question

I get invalid JSON from a script, e.g.

{
  name: "Leo",
  active: true
}

Is there a bash install-able tool I can use to pipe that output and turn it into valid JSON so can be processed by jq given jq doesn't support it ?

This question is similar to Convert invalid json into valid json except I need a command line utility and not some replace based php code.

Answer 1

Hjson does this kind of thing really well.

$ hjson -j <<EOF
> {
>   name: "Leo",
>   active: true
> }
> EOF
{
  "name": "Leo",
  "active": true
}

Answer 2

The jq FAQ at https://github.com/stedolan/jq/wiki/FAQ#processing-not-quite-valid-json lists several tools (including hjson) for converting near-JSON to JSON. Some of them can be used as bash commands, e.g. https://www.npmjs.com/package/any-json, which is particularly versatile.

Incidentally, since jq allows JSON to be specified in a jq program in a flexible way (e.g. quotation marks around key names can be omitted and "#" comments can be added), you can use jq itself to convert many instances of not-quite JSON to JSON. Using your example, if the not-quite JSON text is in a file named input.nqj, then the invocation:

$ jq -n -f input.nqj

would produce:

{
  "name": "Leo",
  "active": true
}

Answer 3

As I don't know how easy it is to deploy Hjson (from Steve Bennett's answer), here's a more lightweight alternative, using sed:

$ sed 's/\b\([^:"]*\)\b\s*:/"\1":/g' <<EOF
> {
>   name: "Leo",
>   active: true
> }
> EOF
{
  "name": "Leo",
  "active": true
}

Note that this is more specific to the example you've provided in the question: it will only fix missing quotation around keys. Also, it might be too aggressive about that, as, for example, integer keys would be quoted as well.