jq-json-processor

What This Skill Does

The jq-json-processor skill provides a powerful command-line interface within OpenClaw to manipulate, query, and transform JSON data. At its core, it leverages the industry-standard jq utility, allowing you to slice, filter, map, and reshape complex JSON structures with surgical precision. Whether you are dealing with deeply nested API responses, large configuration files, or raw log data in JSON format, this tool allows you to extract exactly the information you need without writing custom scripts. It supports everything from basic field selection and array manipulation to advanced data aggregation, grouping, and conditional processing, making it an indispensable asset for developers and data engineers alike.

Installation

You can integrate this skill into your agent environment using the ClawHub package manager. Run the following command in your terminal or agent console: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/arnarsson/jq-json-processor. Once installed, ensure that the underlying jq binary is available in your system path, as the skill acts as a robust wrapper around this engine.

Use Cases

• API Data Cleaning: Quickly strip out metadata from GitHub, AWS, or custom REST API payloads to keep only the relevant fields.
• Log Parsing: Filter server logs in JSON format to identify specific events or count occurrences of specific status codes.
• Config Management: Automatically update version strings or toggle feature flags in large package.json or config.json files during CI/CD tasks.
• Data Conversion: Transform JSON arrays into CSV rows for direct import into spreadsheet software or data visualization tools.
• Debug Workflow: Pipe live curl output directly through this skill to get readable, color-coded, and properly indented output to troubleshoot connectivity issues.

Example Prompts

1. "Filter the output of this JSON file to show only the users with an 'active' status and extract their IDs into a list."
2. "Take this nested API response and flatten it into a simple table format containing only the user name, email, and primary role."
3. "Update the 'version' field in my project's JSON file to '2.1.0' and save it back to the original file."

Tips & Limitations

• Raw Output: Always use the -r flag if you want to output plain strings without JSON quotes, which is essential for passing data to other shell commands.
• Performance: While jq is highly efficient and written in C, processing multi-gigabyte JSON files in a single pass may consume significant system memory; consider splitting extremely large files first.
• Security: Be cautious when using this skill to process JSON files from untrusted sources, as the manipulation commands are executed with the permissions of the agent process.
• Piping: You can chain multiple jq calls if a complex transformation is difficult to express in a single filter expression, though a single optimized filter is usually faster.