[json] Passing bash variable to jq

I have written a script to retrieve certain value from file.json. It works if I provide the value to jq select, but the variable doesn't seem to work (or I don't know how to use it).

#!/bin/sh

#this works ***
projectID=$(cat file.json | jq -r '.resource[] | select(.username=="[email protected]") | .id')
echo "$projectID"

[email protected]

#this does not work *** no value is printed
projectID=$(cat file.json | jq -r '.resource[] | select(.username=="$EMAILID") | .id')
echo "$projectID"

It's a quote issue, you need :

projectID=$(
  cat file.json | jq -r ".resource[] | select(.username=='$EMAILID') | .id"
)

If you put single quotes to delimit the main string, the shell takes $EMAILID literally.

"Double quote" every literal that contains spaces/metacharacters and every expansion: "$var", "$(command "$var")", "${array[@]}", "a & b". Use 'single quotes' for code or literal $'s: 'Costs $5 US', ssh host 'echo "$HOSTNAME"'. See
http://mywiki.wooledge.org/Quotes
http://mywiki.wooledge.org/Arguments
http://wiki.bash-hackers.org/syntax/words

Posting it here as it might help others. In string it might be necessary to pass the quotes to jq. To do the following with jq:

.items[] | select(.name=="string")

in bash you could do

EMAILID=$1
projectID=$(cat file.json | jq -r '.resource[] | select(.username=='\"$EMAILID\"') | .id')

essentially escaping the quotes and passing it on to jq

I know is a bit later to reply, sorry. But that works for me.

export K8S_public_load_balancer_url="$(kubectl get services -n ${TENANT}-production -o wide | grep "ingress-nginx-internal$" | awk '{print $4}')"

And now I am able to fetch and pass the content of the variable to jq

export TF_VAR_public_load_balancer_url="$(aws elbv2 describe-load-balancers --region eu-west-1 | jq -r '.LoadBalancers[] | select (.DNSName == "'$K8S_public_load_balancer_url'") | .LoadBalancerArn')"

In my case I needed to use double quote and quote to access the variable value.

Cheers.

I resolved this issue by escaping the inner double quotes

projectID=$(cat file.json | jq -r ".resource[] | select(.username==\"$EMAILID\") | .id")

Another way to accomplish this is with the jq "--arg" flag. Using the original example:

#!/bin/sh

#this works ***
projectID=$(cat file.json | jq -r '.resource[] | 
select(.username=="[email protected]") | .id')
echo "$projectID"

[email protected]

# Use --arg to pass the variable to jq. This should work:
projectID=$(cat file.json | jq --arg EMAILID $EMAILID -r '.resource[] 
| select(.username=="$EMAILID") | .id')
echo "$projectID"

See here, which is where I found this solution: https://github.com/stedolan/jq/issues/626

Jq now have better way to acces environment variables, you can use env.EMAILI:

projectID=$(cat file.json | jq -r ".resource[] | select(.username==env.EMAILID) | .id")

Little unrelated but I will still put it here, For other practical purposes shell variables can be used as -

value=10
jq  '."key" = "'"$value"'"' file.json