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jsonbashescaping

File content to single JSON string value with bash

I would like to read a file and put the whole content into a single string that is escaped to be used in a JSON object.

And I want to do it on the commandline/terminal (Linux).

Solution

  • Version 1

    WARNING: With this solution the content of the file can be too big to fit in an argument!

    jq  -n                                \
   --arg content "$(cat theFile.txt)" \
   '{ theContent : $content }'        \
|                                     \
jq '.theContent'

    Version 2

    Jeff Mercado provided a more compact solution for the first part - so I adapted that in my code as follows:

    jq -Rs                  \
   '{ theContent: . }'  \
   theFile.txt          \
|                       \
jq '.theContent'

    Version 3

    Now Jeff Mercado provided a more compact solution for what I was looking for:

    jq -Rs '.' theFile.txt