Introduction

TickTick enables you to put JSON in bash scripts. Yes, just encapsulate them with two back-ticks.

Note: This is just a fun hack. You may want to consider using mature languages like Ruby or Perl to solve actual real life problems. Oh who am I kidding, I use whitespace and brainfuck every day.

Note 2: Data backend reimplemented The underlying data backend has been reimplemented using arrays (and associative arrays) and all previous functionality has not been migrated (yet, if ever..). Also, I was unable to avoid saving a temp file to disk during tokenization.. feel free to solve that ;)

Usage

Proper usage (if there is such a thing), is to place the following line right after the "shebang" at the top of your script. For instance:

#!/bin/bash
#
# Nuclear_meltdown_preventer.sh
#
# This is really important stuff. Don't edit it!
#
. ticktick.sh

..

See how that's near the tippity-top? That's where it's supposed to go. If you put it lower, all bets are off. :-(

API

• .

  echo ``elem.sub.value``

• []

  echo ``elem[0]``

• [#]

  len=``elem[#]``; echo ${len}

• [*]

  for val in ``elem[*]``; do echo "$val"; done

• [!]

  for key in ``elem[!]``; do echo "$key = elem[$key]"; done

Examples

Inline Parsing

#!/bin/bash
. ticktick.sh

function printEmployees() {
  echo
  echo "  The ``people.Engineering[#]`` Employees listed are:"

  for employee in ``people.Engineering[*]``; do
    printf "    - %s\n" "``${employee}``"
  done

  echo 
}

printEmployees

echo Indexing an array, doing variable assignments

person0=``people.HR[0]``
echo $person0 ``people.HR[1]``

echo
echo "Looping over key/values (using a variable reference)"
obj=``people.Sales``
for person in ``$obj[!]``; do
    echo " $person profits ``$obj[$person].profits``"
done

# Inline data can be kept any were in the file...
``
  people = {
    "HR" : [
      "Alice",
      $bob,
      "Carol"
    ],
    "Sales": {
      "Gale": { "profits" : 1000 },
      "Harry": { "profits" : 500 }
    }
  }
``

Using a File or cURL

#!/bin/bash
. ../ticktick.sh

# File
DATA=`cat data.json`
# cURL
#DATA=`curl http://foobar3000.com/echo/request.json`

tickParse "$DATA"

echo ``.pathname``
echo ``.headers["user-agent"]``

If you have many calls to tickParse, you may want to add each one to a separate root object:

tickParse "data = $DATA"
echo ``data.pathname``

Mailing List

Join it over here.

LICENSE

This software is available under the following licenses:

• MIT
• Apache 2

Parts of this work are derived from JSON.sh, which is also available under the aforementioned licenses. This version of TickTick is heavily modified by Kaos.