Alternative for jq in debian wheezy to parse json in bash

jq is in Wheezy backports, and slated for Jessie

For backports on Wheezy, add the following to /etc/apt/sources.list (or a file to sources.d/???.list)

deb http://http.debian.net/debian wheezy-backports main

Then:

apt-get -t wheezy-backports install jq

Another alternative:

python -m json.tool file.json

One CLI json parser is jshon. Here is a simple example:

$ jshon -e foo -u <<< '{ "foo":"bar" }' 
bar

The -e options extract values from the json and the -u decodes the final string.

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