Json Patch removing sub elements in an array

Question

I want to remove sub elements from an array for example

{
    "employees": [
        {
            "name": "name1",
            "id": "id1"
        },
        {
            "name": "name2",
            "id": "id2"
        },
        {
            "name": "name3",
            "id": "id3"
        }
    ]
}

And i need a patch to remove all ids so i can do something like this

[{ "op": "remove", "path": "/employees/0/id"},
{ "op": "remove", "path": "/employees/1/id"},
{ "op": "remove", "path": "/employees/2/id"}]

But is there any way to specify wildcard to select all id elements in an array

Answer 1

I've been looking at the JSON patch draft but didn't find anything about regular expressions. One solution is to use some JSON parse tools to create it, like jq and python-json-patch. The first one removes all id keys, and the second one creates a patch from a diff, used like:

jq 'del(.employees[].id)' jsonfile | jsondiff jsonfile -

It yields:

[{"op": "replace", "path": "/employees/2", "value": {"name": "name3"}}, 
 {"op": "replace", "path": "/employees/1", "value": {"name": "name2"}}, 
 {"op": "replace", "path": "/employees/0", "value": {"name": "name1"}}]

Using also the jsonpatch tool to apply the patch, it seems to generate a correct output, like:

jq 'del(.employees[].id)' jsonfile | jsondiff jsonfile - | jsonpatch jsonfile -

It yields:

{"employees": [{"name": "name1"}, {"name": "name2"}, {"name": "name3"}]}