In this very meaty episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots teaches us how to build data structures using jq with JSON files. We're not just querying existing data, we're rebuilding the data the way we want to see it. We learn how to build strings with interpolation, which I find is a very odd word to describe the process. It's really like concatenation in Excel, but maybe that's just me.

We build arrays using jq, and even convert between strings and arrays with the `split` and `join` commands. We build dictionaries in a syntax that is simple and elegant. We also build dictionaries from strings using `capture` with Regular Expressions.

We learn not to do string formatting and escaping using `@` – for example `@csv` can automatically create comma-separated values data for us and @uri can escape characters for us in a URL we build using jq.

Like I said, it's a meaty episode but Bart and I both enjoyed the lesson quite a bit.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net. And just in case I forgot to mention it earlier, remember that we now have transcripts with chapter breaks. This means you can jump pretty easily to a topic to reread exactly how Bart explained something. You even get a time stamp of when he talked on that subject, allowing you to easily skim to the portion of the audio you want to rehear for clarification. All thanks to the magic of Auphonic. Ok, it's not magic, but it _feels_ like magic!

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2024_01_20