JSON to CSV in Linux

Online CSV to JSON converter: https://commabot.com/csv-to-json

Converting JSON to CSV is relatively straightforward and can be done with a command line tool like jq.

For a conversion where you have a simple JSON array of objects, jq can be used directly to format the data as CSV. Consider the following JSON file named data.json:

[
  {
    "name": "John Doe",
    "age": 30,
    "email": "johndoe@example.com"
  },
  {
    "name": "Jane Doe",
    "age": 25,
    "email": "janedoe@example.com"
  }
]

To convert this to CSV, you can use the following jq command:

jq -r '.[] | [.name, .age, .email] | @csv' data.json > data.csv

This command breaks down as follows:

• -r: Outputs raw strings, not JSON texts.

• .[]: Iterates over each element in the JSON array.

• [.name, .age, .email]: Creates a new array with the specified fields for each element.

• @csv: Formats the array as a CSV line.

The output data.csv will look like this:

"John Doe",30,"johndoe@example.com"
"Jane Doe",25,"janedoe@example.com"