How to make paths to leafs of a JSON? - json

Question

Say we have the following JSON:
[
{
"dir-1": [
"file-1.1",
"file-1.2"
]
},
"dir-1",
{
"dir-2": [
"file-2.1"
]
}
]
And we want to get the next output:
"dir-1/file-1.1"
"dir-1/file-1.2"
"dir-1"
"dir-2/file-2.1"
i.e. to get the paths to all leafs, joining items with /. Is there a way to do that on JQ?
I tried something like this:
cat source-file | jq 'path(..) | [ .[] | tostring ] | join("/")'
But it doesn't produce what I need even close.

Answer 1

You could take advantage of how streams work by merging the path with their values. Streams will only emit path, value pairs for leaf values. Just ignore the numbered indices.
$ jq --stream '
select(length == 2) | [(.[0][] | select(strings)), .[1]] | join("/")
' source-file
returns:
"dir-1/file-1.1"
"dir-1/file-1.2"
"dir-1"
"dir-2/file-2.1"

Answer 2

Here is a solution similar to Jeff Mercado's which uses tostream and flatten
tostream | select(length==2) | .[0] |= map(strings) | flatten | join("/")
Try it online at jqplay.org
Another way is to use a recursive function to walk the input such as
def slashpaths($p):
def concat($p;$k): if $p=="" then $k else "\($p)/\($k)" end;
if type=="array" then .[] | slashpaths($p)
elif type=="object" then
keys_unsorted[] as $k
| .[$k] | slashpaths(concat($p;$k))
else concat($p;.) end;
slashpaths("")
Try it online at tio.run!

Answer 3

Using --stream is good but the following is perhaps less esoteric:
paths(scalars) as $p
| getpath($p) as $v
| ($p | map(strings) + [$v])
| join("/")
(If using jq 1.4 or earlier, and if any of the leaves might be numeric or boolean or null, then [$v] above should be replaced by [$v|tostring].)
Whether the result should be regarded as "paths to leaves" is another matter...