Parse Approved-By from git log or git show

Using --pretty=format, you can format git log or git show stdout as you like.

git log \
--pretty=format:'{%n  "commit": "%H",%n  "author": "%an <%ae>",%n  "date": "%ad",%n  "message": "%f"%n},' \
$@ | \
perl -pe 'BEGIN{print "["}; END{print "]\n"}' | \
perl -pe 's/},]/}]/'

Example above parses author, commit, date, message values. How can we parse the value of Approved-by which is available when a pull-request is approved.

Even the official documentation does not mention that

Solution

Approved-by is not a builtin field so Git doesn't have a placeholder for it. We could use other methods to get the fields and format the output.

Suppose the Approved-by line looks like:

Approved-by: Someone Nice

Here is a bash sample:

for commit in $(git log --pretty=%H);do
  echo -e "{\n\
    \"commit\": \"$commit\",\n\
    \"author\": \"$(git log -1 $commit --pretty=%an)\",\n\
    \"date\": \"$(git log -1 $commit --pretty=%cd)\",\n\
    \"message\": \"$(git log -1 $commit --pretty=%f)\",\n\
    \"approved-by\": \"$(git log -1 $commit --pretty=%b | grep Approved-by | awk -F ': ' '{print $NF","}' | xargs echo | sed -e 's/,$//')\"\n\
},"
done | \
perl -pe 'BEGIN{print "["}' | \
sed -e '$s/},/}]/'

It needs improvement to meet your real needs, especially the \"approved-by\" line. Basically it gets all the commit sha1 values first and then parse them to get the fields of each commit and then format the output.