https://github.com/kellyjonbrazil/jc can come pretty handy there

oh my god, why?! just why!?

What the world needs is the inverse program of "jc", where an unparseable json string is expanded into a flat list of lines all of the form "field.subfield=value"

If you search for "gron", you will find a family of such tools, e.g., https://github.com/tailhook/rust-gron.

Thanks, that's just what I needed!

ok well I can understand not wanting json when all you need is something simpler, but I'm not sure if I understand unparseable - I mean if it is JSON then it is parseable.

You can only parse json easily by using json libraries. Plain text, or "field=value" pairs, you can easily cut(1) or grep(1), or sed(1) to your pleasure. This is what I mean by parseable. Parseable trivially by tools that do not understand the format. I can also sed and awk json files, and I do, but it is extremely painful; and more often than not these files are nothing more than simple lists of variables with values, for which the use of json is a ridiculous overkill.

Ok, but I believe that your use of the word parseable diverges quite a bit from common usage.

thanks!