Extract a particular field from json output using jq - json

Question

I'm working a bash script to extraxt specific field from json output using jq.
USERNAME=$(echo "$OUTPUT" | jq -r '.[] | .name')
Due to jq it always fails with parse error: Invalid numeric literal at line 1, column 2 error.
My restapi result has the below output.
[
{
"url": "#/systemadm/groups/uuid-d6e4e05",
"options": {},
"group_id": 313,
"owner": "abc-123-mec",
"owner_id": "ad1337884",
"id": "c258d7b330",
"name": "abc-group"
},
{
"options": {},
"id": "global%3Regmebers",
"name": "Udata-123"
},
{
"url": "#/systemadm/groups/uuid-38943000",
"options": {},
"group_id": 910,
"owner": "framework-abcc",
"owner_id": "78d4472b738bc",
"id": "38943000057a",
"name": "def-group"
},
........................
............................
......................................
So what's wrong with this jq response of code to get "name" ?

Answer 1

jq can only process valid JSON.
If the value of OUTPUT is literally "id": "c258d7b330","name": "abc-group", then you could enclose it in curly braces to make it valid JSON. No guarantees though; this depends on the exact format of your input.
OUTPUT='"id": "c258d7b330",
"name": "abc-group"'
USERNAME="$(printf '%s\n' "{$OUTPUT}" | jq -r '.name')"
printf '%s\n' "$USERNAME"; // abc-group
If it cannot be converted to valid JSON, maybe a simple solution using grep+cut or awk would suffice?
OUTPUT='"id": "c258d7b330",
"name": "abc-group"'
USERNAME="$(printf '%s\n' "$OUTPUT" | grep '^"name":' | cut -d'"' -f4)"
awk:
printf '%s\n' "$OUTPUT" | awk -F'"' '/^"name":/{print $4}'
Or even use jq to parse the input as array of strings and then filter for the line in which you are interested:
jq -Rr '(select(startswith("\"name\":")) / "\"")[3]'
All options are really fragile and I recommend to fix your input to be actual, valid JSON