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Running the tests

Each exercise contains a test file. Run the tests using the bats program.

bats test-hello-world.bats

bats will need to be installed. See the Testing on the Bash track page for instructions to install bats for your system.

bats is implemented in bash

The bats file is a bash script, with some special functions recognized by the bats command. You'll see some tests that look like

jq -f some-exercise.jq <<< "{some,json,here}"

That <<< syntax is a bash Here String. It sends the string on the right-hand side into the standard input of the program on the left-hand side. It is (approximately) the same as

echo "{some,json,here}" | jq -f some-exercise.jq

Help for assert functions

The tests use functions from the bats-assert library. Help for the various assert* functions can be found there.

Skipped tests

Solving an exercise means making all its tests pass. By default, only one test (the first one) is executed when you run the tests. This is intentional, as it allows you to focus on just making that one test pass. Once it passes, you can enable the next test by commenting out or removing the

[[ $BATS_RUN_SKIPPED == true ]] || skip

annotations prepending other tests.

Overriding skips

To run all tests, including the ones with skip annotations, you can run:

BATS_RUN_SKIPPED=true bats test-some-exercise.bats

It can be convenient to use a wrapper function to save on typing: in bash you can do:

bats() {
    BATS_RUN_SKIPPED=true command bats *.bats
}

Then run tests with just:

bats

Debugging in `jq`

jq comes with a handy debug filter. Use it while you are developing your exercise solutions to inspect the data that is currently in the jq pipline. See the debugging doc for more details.

Submitting your solution

You can submit your solution using the exercism submit grade-stats.jq command. This command will upload your solution to the Exercism website and print the solution page's URL.

It's possible to submit an incomplete solution which allows you to:

See how others have completed the exercise
Request help from a mentor

Need to get help?

If you'd like help solving the exercise, check the following pages:

Should those resources not suffice, you could submit your (incomplete) solution to request mentoring.

Need more help?

Go to the Exercism Community forum to get support and ask questions (or just chat!)
- Use the Exercism Support category if you face any issues with working in the web editor, or downloading or submitting your exercises locally.
- Use the Programming:jq category for jq-specific topics.
Join the community on Exercism's Discord server.
StackOverflow can be used to search for your problem and see if it has been answered already. You can also ask and answer questions.
Github issue tracker is where we track our development and maintainance of jq exercises in exercism. If none of the above links help you, feel free to post an issue here.

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