Why in the world would I have to use JavaScript or any object oriented programming language just because the application is poorly thought out and emits JSON? I certainly have better things to do.
It doesn't matter how sensible a format is, those tools are simply not appropriate to write a parser in.
AWK is a language designed for data parsing and processing. That is what it is designed to do.
How did you solve the parsing of arbitrarily nested structures?
> How did you solve the parsing of arbitrarily nested structures?
Write a recursive descent parser, or use a parser generator.
Or, more realistically, use one of the many libraries available for parsing it (pretty much every language has one at this point).
Hope one of these helps with your problem:
Re:Parsing JSON is a Minefield
by rarepostinlurkr on Tuesday April 24, 2018 @01:07AM
(#16909989)
Json is clearly data.
If awk cannot parse it, perhaps it’s a shortcoming of awk? =)
I have, however, written a JSON parser before at a previous company in C++ (they didn't want to pull in a library). It wasn't particularly hard.
And yes, like any other parser, it accepted additional non-JSON constructs. This was simply because it was take additional work to error out on those constructs, which would be a waste of time.