ojg

Another alternative is oj, https://github.com/ohler55/ojg. I don't know how the performance compares to jq or any others but it does use JSONPath as the query language. It has a few other options for making nicely formatted JSON and colorizing JSON.

If you prefer JSONPath as a query language, oj from https://github.com/ohler55/ojg provides that functionality. It can also be installed with brew. (disclaimer, I'm the author of OjG)

There are a few more tolerant versions of JSON. In OjG I called the format SEN https://github.com/ohler55/ojg/blob/develop/sen.md

I found Jq to be difficult to use which is why Oj, https://github.com/ohler55/ojg is based on JSONPath. There still are a lot of options but it only takes a couple of help screens to figure out what the options are.

You might want to take a look at https://github.com/ohler55/ojg. It takes a different approach with a single pass parser. There are some performance benchmarks included on the README.md landing page.

I like the "Simple Encoding Notation" (SEN) of the underlying library: https://github.com/ohler55/ojg/blob/develop/sen.md " A valid example of a SEN document is: { one: 1 two: 2 array: [a b c] yes: true } "

For some specific cases simdjson might be the fastest but it does fare as well in other cases as seen here: https://github.com/ohler55/compare-go-json or here: https://github.com/ohler55/ojc/blob/master/misc/compete.md. Parsing the JSON file is only part of the solution though. There needs to be an efficient and easy way to extract the data of interest. OjG (https://github.com/ohler55/ojg) has a JSONPath implementation for that. Written in go is a high performer.

For me OjG (https://github.com/ohler55/ojg) has been great. I regularly use it on files that can not be loaded into memory. The best JSON file format for multiple record is one JSON document per record all in the same file. OjG doesn't care if they are on different lines. It is fast (https://github.com/ohler55/compare-go-json) and uses a fairly complete JSONPath implementation for searches. Similar to jq but using JSONPath instead of a proprietary query language. I am biased though as I wrote OjG to handle what other tools were not able to do.

Another alternative is the oj app (ojg/cmd/oj) which is part of https://github.com/ohler55/ojg. It relies on JSONPath for extraction and manipulation of JSON.

Just tried [OjG](https://github.com/ohler55/ojg) and saw anywhere from zero to 20% faster on the various benchmarks. Nice improvement overall. Hats off to the golang maintainers.

I keep the `-p` (pretty) option as a single option. Not a convention at all. I toyed with 80x3 and 80:3 but ended up with 80.3. You are right though, it probably make sense to support two options as well to avoid the unusual convention. Maybe a `-edge` and `-max-depth` options in addition. Issue created: https://github.com/ohler55/ojg/issues/36