I found jq the other day (http://stedolan.github.io/jq/), which is a commandline utility for manipulating json data, resembling awk.
Considering the number of API's that return json data these days, it's simplified my life a great deal. It's proven especially useful for automation shell scripts, when working with things like the aws command line client that return all results as json. Usually I'm looking to extract something like a single field to use as input for a following command, and jq makes it really easy. No more inline python or awkward sed regex's. :)
It's available using apt-get on debian/ubuntu, but that version is out of date with the online docs. It's rather trivial to build from source though (it has no external deps).
On a similar note, there is also csvkit [1] for csv files. It is not quite as full featured as I had like, but it is easier than manipulating csv content directly via cut/column/grep/sed.
Considering the number of API's that return json data these days, it's simplified my life a great deal. It's proven especially useful for automation shell scripts, when working with things like the aws command line client that return all results as json. Usually I'm looking to extract something like a single field to use as input for a following command, and jq makes it really easy. No more inline python or awkward sed regex's. :)
It's available using apt-get on debian/ubuntu, but that version is out of date with the online docs. It's rather trivial to build from source though (it has no external deps).