bash - jq not parsing json with spaces

Monday, 30 April 2018

I’m trying to run the following command that reads JSON from a file and formats it with jq :

jq -n -r --arg m $(<$1) '$m | fromjson | {records:[{value:.}]}'

It produces the desired output when the input JSON does not contain spaces, such as {"test":"helloworld"} :

{
  "records": [
    {
       "value": {
        "test": "helloworld"
      }
     }

  ]
}

However, for an input like {"test":"hello world"} it would give the following error:

jq: error: syntax error, unexpected QQSTRING_START, expecting $end (Unix shell quoting issues?) at , line 1:
world"}     
jq: 1 compile error

Can’t figure out what’s causing this problem.

Thanks for any help :)

Answer

It's not a jq problem but a quoting issue (as highlighted in the error).

Change the --arg option to have the value within double quote:

arg='{"test":"hello world"}'

jq -n -r --arg m "$arg" '$m | fromjson | {records:[{value:.}]}'

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