How to create 2 CSV files from 1 JSON using JQ - json

Question

I have a lot of rather large JSON logs which need to be imported into several DB tables.
I can easily parse them and create 1 CSV for import.
But how can I parse the JSON and get 2 different CSV files as output?
Simple (nonsense) example:
testJQ.log
{"id":1234,"type":"A","group":"games"}
{"id":5678,"type":"B","group":"cars"}
using
cat testJQ.log|jq --raw-output '[.id,.type,.group]|#csv'>testJQ.csv
I get one file testJQ.csv
1234,"A","games
5678,"B","cars"
But I would like to get this
types.csv
1234,"A"
5678,"B"
groups.csv
1234,"games"
5678,"cars"
Can this be done without having to parse the JSON twice, first time creating the types.csv and second time the groups.csv like this?
cat testJQ.log|jq --raw-output '[.id,.type]|#csv'>types.csv
cat testJQ.log|jq --raw-output '[.id,.group]|#csv'>groups.csv

Answer 1

I suppose one way you could hack this up is to output the contents of one file to stdout and the others to stderr and redirect to separate files. Of course you're limited to two files though.
$ <testJQ.log jq -r '([.id,.type]|#csv),([.id,.group]|#csv|stderr|empty)' \
1>types.csv 2>groups.csv
stderr outputs to stderr but the value propagates to the output, so you'll want to follow that up with empty to swallow that up.
Personally I wouldn't recommend doing this, I would just write a python script (or other language) to parse this if you needed to output to multiple files.

Answer 2

You will either need to run jq twice, or to run jq in conjunction with another program to "split" the output of the call to jq. For example, you could use a pipeline of the form: jq -c ... | awk ...
The potential disadvantage of the pipeline approach is that if JSON is the final output, it will be JSONL; but obviously that doesn't apply here.
There are many ways to craft such a pipeline. For example, assuming there are no raw newlines in the CSV:
< testJQ.log jq -r '
"types", ([.id,.type] |#csv),
"groups", ([.id,.group]|#csv)' |
awk 'NR % 2 == 1 {out=$1; next} {print >> out".csv"}'
Or:
< testJQ.log jq -r '([.id,.type],[.id,.group])|#csv' |
awk '{ out = ((NR % 2) == 1) ? "types" : "groups"; print >> out".csv"}'
For other examples, see e.g.
Using jq how can I split a very large JSON file into multiple files, each a specific quantity of objects?
Splitting / chunking JSON files with JQ in Bash or Fish shell?
Split JSON into multiple files
Handling raw new-lines
Whether or not you split the CSV into multiple files, there is a potential issue with embedded raw newlines. One approach is to change "\n" in JSON strings to "\\n", e.g.
jq -r '([.id,.type],[.id,.group])
| map(if type == "string" then gsub("\n";"\\n") else . end)
| #csv'