jq

jq is like sed for JSON data - you can use it to slice, filter, map and transform structured data with the same ease that sed, awk, grep and friends let you play with text. jq is written in portable C, and it has zero runtime dependencies. You can download a single binary, scp it to a far away machine of the same type, and expect it to work. jq can mangle the data format that you have into the one that you want with very little effort, and the program to do so is often shorter and simpler than you'd expect. Data in jq is represented as streams of JSON values - every jq expression runs for each value in its input stream, and can produce any number of values to its output stream. jq filters run on a stream of JSON data. The input to jq is parsed as a sequence of whitespace-separated JSON values which are passed through the provided filter one at a time. The output(s) of the filter are written to standard out, again as a sequence of whitespace-separated JSON data.