exercism/jq/log-line-parser/README.md

Log Line Parser

Welcome to Log Line Parser on Exercism's jq Track. If you need help running the tests or submitting your code, check out HELP.md. If you get stuck on the exercise, check out HINTS.md, but try and solve it without using those first :)

Introduction

Strings

Recall that jq supports the same datatypes as JSON. JSON describes strings as:

A string is a sequence of zero or more Unicode characters, wrapped in double quotes, using backslash escapes.

Escape sequences

Within a string, use the backslash character to embed "special" characters:

• \" a literal quotation mark,
• \\ a literal backslash,
• whitespace characters \n, \t, \r, \f, \b
• unicode characters \uAAAA where A is a hex digit

String length

To find the number of characters, use the length function.

$ jq -cn --args  '$ARGS.positional[] | length' "Hello world!" "❄🌡🤧🤒🏥🕰😀"
12
7

Substrings

The slice notation can be used to extract substrings. The syntax is .[i:j]. The substring returned is of length j - i, returning characters from index i (inclusive) to index j (exclusive). Either index can be negative, in which case it counts backwards from the end of the string. Either index can be omitted, in which case it refers to the start or end of the string. Indexes are zero-based.

"abcdefghij"[3:6]   # => "def"
"abcdefghij"[3:]    # => "defghij"
"abcdefghij"[:-2]   # => "abcdefgh"

Concatenation

Use + to join strings:

"Hello" + " " + "world!"
# => "Hello world!"

Use add when given an array of strings:

["Hello", " ", "world!"] | add
# => "Hello world!"

Split and Join

Splitting uses the split/1 function or the / operator:

"Hello beautiful world!" | split(" ")   # => ["Hello", "beautiful", "world!"]

"Hello beautiful world!" / " "          # => ["Hello", "beautiful", "world!"]

The inverse of split/1 is join/1.

Converting a string into an array of characters is frequently needed. There are two ways to do this:

1. split on an empty string

   "Hi friend 😀" / ""   # => ["H","i"," ","f","r","i","e","n","d"," ","😀"]
   

2. explode into an array of codepoints

   "Hi friend 😀" | explode   # => [72,105,32,102,114,105,101,110,100,32,128512]
   

   implode is the inverse of explode.

Find the index of a substring

Use the index/1 function; the index is zero-based.

"hello" | index("el")'   # => 1

If the substring is not in the string, the result is null

"hello" | index("elk")   # => null

String interpolation

Within a string, the sequence \(expression) will embed the result of that expression into the string:

"The current datetime is \(now | strflocaltime("%c"))"   # => "The current datetime is Wed Nov 16 17:06:33 2022"

Case conversion

Use the ascii_downcase and ascii_upcase functions.

Regular expressions

jq has rich support for regular expressions: this will be the topic of a later lesson.

Instructions

In this exercise you'll be processing log entries.

Each log line is a string formatted as follows: "[<LEVEL>]: <MESSAGE>".

There are three different log levels:

• INFO
• WARNING
• ERROR

You have three tasks, each of which will take a log line and ask you to do something with it. There are lots of ways to solve these tasks - choose your favourite techniques from the examples above and see what you can come up with.

1. Get message from a log line

Implement the message function to return a log line's message:

"[ERROR]: Invalid operation" | message
# => "Invalid operation"

Any leading or trailing white space should be removed:

"[WARNING]:  Disk almost full\r\n" | message
# => "Disk almost full"

2. Get log level from a log line

Implement the log_level function to return a log line's log level, which should be returned in lowercase:

"[ERROR]: Invalid operation" | log_level
# => "error"

3. Reformat a log line

Implement the reformat function that reformats the log line, putting the message first and the log level after it in parentheses:

"[INFO]: Operation completed" | reformat
# => "Operation completed (info)"

Source

Created by

• @glennj