Using jq to format JSON on the clipboard

# Using jq to format JSON on the clipboard Source: [https://chris48s.github.io/blogmarks/posts/2021/jsontidy/](https://chris48s.github.io/blogmarks/posts/2021/jsontidy/) [Jq](https://stedolan.github.io/jq/)is a great tool\. I use it frequently, but[this recent article](https://sequoia.makes.software/parsing-json-at-the-cli-a-practical-introduction-to-jq-and-more/)from Sequoia McDowell still has some great tips in it\. Well worth a read\. One thing that stood out to me from this post was the snippet: > I like this pretty\-printing/formatting capability so much, I have an alias that formats JSON I've copied \(in my OS "clipboard"\) & puts it back in my clipboard: `alias jsontidy="pbpaste \| jq '\.' \| pbcopy"` That's crazy\-useful, but I need to tweak it a bit\. Firstly, as noted,`pbcopy`and`pbpaste`are mac utils\. No worries\. We can substitute`xclip`on Linux: ``` xclip -selection clipboard -o | jq '.' | xclip -selection clipboard ``` I spotted a minor problem here though: If I run this and the text on my clipboard isn't JSON then`jq`will exit with a non\-zero code, output something like`parse error: Invalid numeric literal at line 1, column 6`to stderr and nothing to stdout\. Pipe doesn't care about the non\-zero exit code though so we overwrite whatever was on the clipboard with an empty string\. So lets add a bit of error handing: ``` alias jsontidy="xclip -selection clipboard -o | (jq '.' || xclip -selection clipboard -o) | xclip -selection clipboard" ``` Now`jsontidy`will format whatever is on the clipboard if it can parse as JSON but leave it alone otherwise\.