Day: August 18, 2020

I struggled to find out a way to merge JSON arrays, so to save you time, I will show you an example here.

jq

I’m sure there are several ways to accomplish it with programming languages, I will use jq. Just run brew install jq in your terminal if you use Mac.

Sample Data

fruits1.json

{
    "data":[
      {"name":"banana"},
      {"name":"strawberry"},
      {"name":"orange"}
    ]
}

fruits2.json

{
    "data":[
      {"name":"cherry"},
      {"name":"blueberry"},
      {"name":"apple"}
    ]
}

Merging

Execute the following jq command to merge the 2 arrays in 2 different JSON data.

 jq -s '{ data: map(.data[]) }' fruits1.json fruits2.json

Here is the result.

{
  "data": [
    {
      "name": "banana"
    },
    {
      "name": "strawberry"
    },
    {
      "name": "orange"
    },
    {
      "name": "cherry"
    },
    {
      "name": "blueberry"
    },
    {
      "name": "apple"
    }
  ]
}

If you just want a compact version of the same JSON data.

jq -sc '{ data: map(.data[]) }' fruits1.json fruits2.json

Here is the result.

{"data":[{"name":"banana"},{"name":"strawberry"},{"name":"orange"},{"name":"cherry"},{"name":"blueberry"},{"name":"apple"}]}

Though I don’t like jq, I had to accomplish it in a bash script I was working on. I could not contain my joy when I got it. 🙂