After a five year hiatus we're back with a GitHub organization, with new admins and new maintainers who have brought a great deal of energy to make a long-awaited and long-needed new release. We're very grateful for all the new owners, admins, and maintainers. Special thanks go to Owen Ou (@owenthereal) for pushing to set up a new GitHub organization for jq, Stephen Dolan (@stedolan) for transferring the jq repository to the new organization, @itchyny for doing a great deal of work to get the release done, Mattias Wadman (@wader) and Emanuele Torre (@emanuele6) for many PRs and code reviews. Many others also contributed PRs, issues, and code reviews as well, and you can find their contributions in the Git log and on the closed issues and PRs page.

What's Changed

Since the last stable release many things have happened:

• jq now lives at https://github.com/jqlang
• New maintainers, admins, and owners have been recruited.
  • A list of current maintainers
• NEWS file is replaced by NEWS.md with Markdown format. @wader #2599
• CI, scan builds, release, website builds etc now use GitHub actions. @owenthereal @wader @itchyny #2596 #2603 #2620 #2723
• Lots of documentation improvements and fixes.
• Website updated with new section search box, better section ids for linking, dark mode, etc. @itchyny #2628
• Release builds for:
  • Linux amd64, arm64, armel, armhf, i386, mips, mips64, mips64el, mips64r6, mips64r6el, mipsel, mipsr6, mipsr6el, powerpc, ppc64el, riscv64 and s390x
  • macOS amd64 and arm64
  • Windows i386 and amd64
  • Docker linux/386, linux/amd64, linux/arm64, linux/mips64le, linux/ppc64le, linux/riscv64 and linux/s390x
  • More details see @owenthereal #2665
• Docker images are now available from ghcr.io/jqlang/jq instead of Docker Hub. @itchyny #2652 #2686
• OSS-fuzz. @DavidKorczynski #2760 #2762

Full commit log can be found at https://github.com/jqlang/jq/compare/jq-1.6...jq-1.7 but here are some highlights:

CLI changes

• Make object key color configurable using JQ_COLORS environment variable. @itchyny @haguenau @ericpruitt #2703

  # this would make "field" bold yellow (`1;33`, the last value)
  $ JQ_COLORS="0;90:0;37:0;37:0;37:0;32:1;37:1;37:1;33" ./jq -n '{field: 123}'
  {
    "field": 123
  }
  

• Change the default color of null to Bright Black. @itchyny #2824

• Respect NO_COLOR environment variable to disable color output. See https://no-color.org for details. @itchyny #2728

• Improved --help output. Now mentions all options and nicer order. @itchyny @wader #2747 #2766 #2799

• Fix multiple issues of exit code using --exit-code/-e option. @ryo1kato #1697

  # true-ish last output value exits with zero
  $ jq -ne true ; echo $?
  true
  0
  # false-ish last output value (false and null) exits with 1
  $ jq -ne false ; echo $?
  false
  1
  # no output value exists with 4
  $ jq -ne empty ; echo $?
  4
  

• Add --binary/-b on Windows for binary output. To get \n instead of \r\n line endings. @nicowilliams 0dab2b1

• Add --raw-output0 for NUL (zero byte) separated output. @asottile @pabs3 @itchyny #1990 #2235 #2684

  # will output a zero byte after each output
  $ jq -n --raw-output0 '1,2,3' | xxd
  00000000: 3100 3200 3300                           1.2.3.
  # can be used with xargs -0
  $ jq -n --raw-output0 '"a","b","c"' | xargs -0 -n1
  a
  b
  c
  $ jq -n --raw-output0 '"a b c", "d\ne\nf"' | xargs -0 printf '[%s]\n'
  [a b c]
  [d
  e
  f]
  # can be used with read -d ''
  $ while IFS= read -r -d '' json; do
  >   jq '.name' <<< "$json"
  > done < <(jq -n --raw-output0 '{name:"a b c"},{name:"d\ne\nf"}')
  "a b c"
  "d\ne\nf"
  # also it's an error to output a string containing a NUL when using NUL separator
  $ jq -n --raw-output0 '"\u0000"'
  jq: error (at <unknown>): Cannot dump a string containing NUL with --raw-output0 option
  

• Fix assert crash and validate JSON for --jsonarg. @wader #2658

• Remove deprecated --argfile option. @itchyny #2768

• Enable stack protection. @nicowilliams #2801

Language changes

• Use decimal number literals to preserve precision. Comparison operations respects precision but arithmetic operations might truncate. @leonid-s-usov #1752

  # precision is preserved
  $ echo '100000000000000000' | jq .
  100000000000000000
  # comparison respects precision (this is false in JavaScript)
  $ jq -n '100000000000000000 < 100000000000000001'
  true
  # sort/0 works
  $ jq -n -c '[100000000000000001, 100000000000000003, 100000000000000004, 100000000000000002] | sort'
  [100000000000000001,100000000000000002,100000000000000003,100000000000000004]
  # arithmetic operations might truncate (same as JavaScript)
  $ jq -n '100000000000000000 + 10'
  100000000000000020
  

• Adds new builtin pick(stream) to emit a projection of the input object or array. @pkoppstein #2656 #2779

  $ jq -n '{"a": 1, "b": {"c": 2, "d": 3}, "e": 4} | pick(.a, .b.c, .x)'
  {
    "a": 1,
    "b": {
      "c": 2
    },
    "x": null
  }
  

• Adds new builtin debug(msgs) that works like debug but applies a filter on the input before writing to stderr. @pkoppstein #2710

  $ jq -n '1 as $x | 2 | debug("Entering function foo with $x == \($x)", .) | (.+1)'
  ["DEBUG:","Entering function foo with $x == 1"]
  ["DEBUG:",2]
  3
  $ jq -n '{a: 1, b: 2, c: 3} | debug({a, b, sum: (.a+.b)})'
  ["DEBUG:",{"a":1,"b":2,"sum":3}]
  {
    "a": 1,
    "b": 2,
    "c": 3
  }
  

• Adds new builtin scan($re; $flags). Was documented but not implemented. @itchyny #1961

  # look for pattern "ab" in "abAB" ignoring casing
  $ jq -n '"abAB" | scan("ab"; "i")'
  "ab"
  "AB"
  

• Adds new builtin abs to get absolute value. This potentially allows the literal value of numbers to be preserved as length and fabs convert to float. @pkoppstein #2767

• Allow if without else-branch. When skipped the else-branch will be . (identity). @chancez @wader #1825 #2481

  # convert 1 to "one" otherwise keep as is
  $ jq -n '1,2 | if . == 1 then "one" end'
  "one"
  2
  # behaves the same as
  $ jq -n '1,2 | if . == 1 then "one" else . end'
  "one"
  2
  # also works with elif
  $ jq -n '1,2,3 | if . == 1 then "one" elif . == 2 then "two" end
  "one"
  "two"
  3
  

• Allow use of $binding as key in object literals. @nicowilliams 8ea4a55

  $ jq -n '"a" as $key | {$key: 123}'
  {
    "a": 123
  }
  # previously parentheses were needed
  $ jq -n '"a" as $key | {($key): 123}'
  {
    "a": 123
  }
  

Full Changelog: https://github.com/jqlang/jq/compare/jq-1.7rc2...jq-1.7