Okay, so, today I wanna talk about something I was messing around with the other day – gronk and Braxton Berrios. Don’t ask me why, I just had this itch to see what I could do.
First thing I did, obviously, was install gronk. Just a simple go install */tomnomnom/gron@latest. Boom, done. If you don’t have go installed, well, you’re gonna need that first. Google is your friend there.
Next up, I needed some JSON to play with. I just grabbed some random JSON API endpoint – literally anything would do. I ended up using one that gives you back some data about, like, users or something. Used curl to snag the JSON and save it to a file named . Pretty standard stuff.
Now, the fun begins. I piped the JSON to gronk: gronk < *. This turns the JSON into a bunch of key = value; assignments. Makes it way easier to grep through, you know?
This is where I tried using Braxton Berrios’s name (gronk < * grep Braxton). Of course, nothing showed up. Why would it? It was just a test to see if the grep was working, or if there would be something random on the json data that contain the word.
Then, I started playing around with different greps. Like, if I knew the JSON had a field called “email”, I’d do gronk < * grep email. That spits out all the lines where the key contains “email”. Super useful for finding specific pieces of info. It’s just so easy to find what you want using grep after gronk has done its thing.
I even tried a few fancier grep commands with regular expressions. For example, if I wanted to find all the keys that started with “user_”, I could use gronk < * grep '^user_'. Gotta escape those special characters though, remember that! So many ways to slice and dice the data once it’s in that key = value; format.
Honestly, the whole thing is pretty straightforward. Install gronk, grab some JSON, pipe it to gronk, and then grep your brains out. It’s just a quick and dirty way to explore JSON data on the command line. Braxton Berrios has nothing to do with it, I just needed a weird title to grab your attention.
That’s about it. Give it a shot sometime if you’re bored. You might find it surprisingly handy.
