[json] How to count items in JSON object using command line?

I'm getting this kind of JSON reply from a curl command:

[
  {
    "cid": 49,
    "pyn": "yi4",
    "hans": "?",
    "hant": "?",
    "tid": 68,
    "l10n": "cent million",
    "pid": 1,
    "pos": "num",
    "pos_txt": ""
  },
  {
    "cid": 50,
    "pyn": "yi4",
    "hans": "?",
    "hant": "?",
    "tid": 69,
    "l10n": "100 millions",
    "pid": 1,
    "pos": "num",
    "pos_txt": ""
  }
]

How can I count the number of items in the array (here 2), using Bash or a command line (e.g. underscore) ?

A simple solution is to install jshon library :

jshon -l < /tmp/test.json
2

The shortest expression is

curl 'http://…' | jq length

You can also use jq to track down the array within the returned json and then pipe that in to a second jq call to get its length. Suppose it was in a property called records, like {"records":[...]}.

$ curl https://my-source-of-json.com/list | jq -r '.records' | jq length
2
$