As someone who doesn't use jq, a number of questions immediately jump out at me. Why is the input string double qouted ('"input"')? What does the backslash annotate? At first it looks like an escape similar to regex, but the other bracket doesn't have it so it must mean something else? Etc. Of course I could look the answers up, but the point is I can't tell without looking it up. While the code is short it feels similar to Awk, if you know it it's trivial, if you don't know it it's hard to be sure what it does without trying it out.