JSONPath Plus

Analyse, transform, and selectively extract data from JSON documents (and JavaScript objects).

jsonpath-plus expands on the original specification to add some additional operators and makes explicit some behaviors the original did not spell out.

You can try it within the browser demo

Features

• Compliant with the original jsonpath spec
• Convenient additions or elaborations not provided in the original spec:
  • ^ for grabbing the parent of a matching item
  • ~ for grabbing property names of matching items (as array)
  • Type selectors for obtaining:
    • Basic JSON types: @null(), @boolean(), @number(), @string(), @array(), @object()
    • @integer()
    • The compound type @scalar() (which also accepts undefined and non-finite numbers when querying JavaScript objects as well as all of the basic non-object/non-function types)
    • @other() usable in conjunction with a user-defined otherTypeCallback
    • Non-JSON types that can nevertheless be used when querying non-JSON JavaScript objects (@undefined(), @function(), @nonFinite())
  • @path/@parent/@property/@parentProperty/@root shorthand selectors within filters
  • Escaping
    • ` for escaping remaining sequence
    • @['...']/?@['...'] syntax for escaping special characters within property names in filters
  • Documents $.. (getting all parent components)
• In addition to queried values, can return various meta-information including paths or pointers to the value, as well as the parent object and parent property name (to allow for modification).
• Utilities for converting between paths, arrays, and pointers
• Option to prevent evaluations permitted in the original spec or supply a sandbox for evaluated values.
• Option for callback to handle results as they are obtained.

Setup

1. create a script include JSONPath
2. fill in the script field with the content of JSONPath.js file
3. you should now be able to call it via globally available function e.g. JSONPath(path, json)

Usage

The full signature available is:

var result = JSONPath([options,] path, json, callback, otherTypeCallback);

The arguments path, json, callback, and otherTypeCallback can alternatively be expressed (along with any other of the available properties) on options.

Note that result will contain all items found (optionally wrapped into an array) whereas callback can be used if you wish to perform some operation as each item is discovered, with the callback function being executed 0 to N times depending on the number of independent items to be found in the result. See the docs below for more on JSONPath's available arguments.

See also the API docs.

Properties

The properties that can be supplied on the options object or evaluate method (as the first argument) include:

• path (required) - The JSONPath expression as a (normalized or unnormalized) string or array
• json (required) - The JSON object to evaluate (whether of null, boolean, number, string, object, or array type).
• autostart (default: true) - If this is supplied as false, one may call the evaluate method manually.
• flatten (default: false) - Whether the returned array of results will be flattened to a single dimension array.
• resultType (default: "value") - Can be case-insensitive form of "value", "path", "pointer", "parent", or "parentProperty" to determine respectively whether to return results as the values of the found items, as their absolute paths, as JSON Pointers to the absolute paths, as their parent objects, or as their parent's property name. If set to "all", all of these types will be returned on an object with the type as key name.
• sandbox (default: {}) - Key-value map of variables to be available to code evaluations such as filtering expressions. (Note that the current path and value will also be available to those expressions; see the Syntax section for details.)
• wrap (default: true) - Whether or not to wrap the results in an array. If wrap is set to false, and no results are found, undefined will be returned (as opposed to an empty array when wrap is set to true). If wrap is set to false and a single non-array result is found, that result will be the only item returned (not within an array). An array will still be returned if multiple results are found, however. To avoid ambiguities (in the case where it is necessary to distinguish between a result which is a failure and one which is an empty array), it is recommended to switch the default to false.
• preventEval (default: false) - Although JavaScript evaluation expressions are allowed by default, for security reasons (if one is operating on untrusted user input, for example), one may wish to set this option to true to throw exceptions when these expressions are attempted.
• parent (default: null) - In the event that a query could be made to return the root node, this allows the parent of that root node to be returned within results.
• parentProperty (default: null) - In the event that a query could be made to return the root node, this allows the parentProperty of that root node to be returned within results.
• callback (default: (none)) - If supplied, a callback will be called immediately upon retrieval of an end point value. The three arguments supplied will be the value of the payload (according to resultType), the type of the payload (whether it is a normal "value" or a "property" name), and a full payload object (with all resultTypes).
• otherTypeCallback (default: <A function that throws an error when @other() is encountered>) - In the current absence of JSON Schema support, one can determine types beyond the built-in types by adding the operator @other() at the end of one's query. If such a path is encountered, the otherTypeCallback will be invoked with the value of the item, its path, its parent, and its parent's property name, and it should return a boolean indicating whether the supplied value belongs to the "other" type or not (or it may handle transformations and return false).

Instance methods

• evaluate(path, json, callback, otherTypeCallback) OR evaluate({path: <path>, json: <json object>, callback: <callback function>, otherTypeCallback: <otherTypeCallback function>}) - This method is only necessary if the autostart property is set to false. It can be used for repeated evaluations using the same configuration. Besides the listed properties, the latter method pattern can accept any of the other allowed instance properties (except for autostart which would have no relevance here).

Class properties and methods

• JSONPath.cache - Exposes the cache object for those who wish to preserve and reuse it for optimization purposes.
• JSONPath.toPathArray(pathAsString) - Accepts a normalized or unnormalized path as string and converts to an array: for example, ['$', 'aProperty', 'anotherProperty'].
• JSONPath.toPathString(pathAsArray) - Accepts a path array and converts to a normalized path string. The string will be in a form like: $['aProperty']['anotherProperty][0]. The JSONPath terminal constructions ~ and ^ and type operators like @string() are silently stripped.
• JSONPath.toPointer(pathAsArray) - Accepts a path array and converts to a JSON Pointer. The string will be in a form like: /aProperty/anotherProperty/0 (with any ~ and / internal characters escaped as per the JSON Pointer spec). The JSONPath terminal constructions ~ and ^ and type operators like @string() are silently stripped.

Examples

Given the following JSON, taken from http://goessner.net/articles/JsonPath/:

{
  "store": {
    "book": [
      {
        "category": "reference",
        "author": "Nigel Rees",
        "title": "Sayings of the Century",
        "price": 8.95
      },
      {
        "category": "fiction",
        "author": "Evelyn Waugh",
        "title": "Sword of Honour",
        "price": 12.99
      },
      {
        "category": "fiction",
        "author": "Herman Melville",
        "title": "Moby Dick",
        "isbn": "0-553-21311-3",
        "price": 8.99
      },
      {
        "category": "fiction",
        "author": "J. R. R. Tolkien",
        "title": "The Lord of the Rings",
        "isbn": "0-395-19395-8",
        "price": 22.99
      }
    ],
    "bicycle": {
      "color": "red",
      "price": 19.95
    }
  }
}

Filter all books cheaper than 10

var result = JSONPath("$..book[?(@.price<10)]", json);

// [
//   {
//     "category": "reference",
//     "author": "Nigel Rees",
//     "title": "Sayings of the Century",
//     "price": 8.95
//   },
//   {
//     "category": "fiction",
//     "author": "Herman Melville",
//     "title": "Moby Dick",
//     "isbn": "0-553-21311-3",
//     "price": 8.99
//   }
// ]

Grab all authors

var result = JSONPath("$..author", json);

// [
//   "Nigel Rees",
//   "Evelyn Waugh",
//   "Herman Melville",
//   "J. R. R. Tolkien"
// ]

More examples can be found here

Credits

The code has been taken from JSONPath-Plus repo and slightly adjusted to be able to run on the platform JavaScript engine.