Make JSON greppable super fast!

fastgron transforms JSON into discrete assignments to make it easier to grep for what you want and see the absolute 'path' to it. It eases the exploration of APIs that return large blobs of JSON but have terrible documentation.

fastgron is a high-performance JSON to GRON converter, developed in C 20, utilizing simdjson library. It's 50x faster than gron on big files (400MB/s input / 1.8GB/s output on M1 Macbook Pro), so it makes big JSON files greppable.

$ fastgron "https://api.github.com/repos/adamritter/fastgron/commits?per_page=1" | fgrep commit.author
json[0].commit.author = {}
json[0].commit.author.name = "adamritter"
json[0].commit.author.email = "58403584 [email protected]"
json[0].commit.author.date = "2023-05-30T18:04:25Z"

fastgron can work backwards too, enabling you to turn your filtered data back into JSON:

$ fastgron "https://api.github.com/repos/adamritter/fastgron/commits?per_page=1" | fgrep commit.author | fastgron --ungron
[
  {
    "commit": {
      "author": {
        "date": "2023-05-30T18:11:03Z",
        "email": "58403584 [email protected]",
        "name": "adamritter"
      }
    }
  }
]

• Arch: yay -S fastgron-git
• Homebrew: brew install fastgron --build-from-source
• Nix: nix profile install github:adamritter/fastgron#fastgron
• Ubuntu: Download the latest binary from releases.
• Windows: Download the latest binary from releases. Note that libcurl support is missing from the released binary, so http and https URLs can't yet be read directly.

$ cat testdata/two.json
{
    "name": "Tom",
    "github": "https://github.com/tomnomnom/",
    "likes": ["code", "cheese", "meat"],
    "contact": {
        "email": "[email protected]",
        "twitter": "@TomNomNom"
    }
}

$ fastgron testdata/two.json
json = {}
json.name = "Tom"
json.github = "https://github.com/tomnomnom/"
json.likes = []
json.likes[0] = "code"
json.likes[1] = "cheese"
json.likes[2] = "meat"
json.contact = {}
json.contact.email = "[email protected]"
json.contact.twitter = "@TomNomNom"

$ fastgron --help
Usage: fastgron [OPTIONS] [FILE | URL] [.path]

positional arguments:
  FILE           file name (or '-' for standard input)

options:
  -h, --help     show this help message and exit
  -V, --version  show version information and exit
  -s, --stream   enable stream mode
  -F, --fixed-string PATTERN  filter output by fixed string.
                     If -F is provided multiple times, multiple patterns are searched.
  -v, --invert-match select non-matching lines for fixed string search
  -i, --ignore-case  ignore case distinctions in PATTERN
  --sort sort output by key
  --user-agent   set user agent
  --header Name:value     set custom HTTP header, can be used multiple times
  -u, --ungron   ungron: convert gron output back to JSON
  -p, -path      filter path, for example .#.3.population or cities.#.population
                 -p is optional if path starts with . and file with that name doesn't exist
                 More complex path expressions: .{id,users[1:-3:2].{name,address}}
                 [[3]] is an index accessor without outputting on the path.
                 {globalid:id,user:users:[[1]],...}  -- path renaming with accessor. It's a minimal, limited implementation right now.
  --no-indent   don't indent output
  --root        root path, default is json
  --semicolon   add semicolon to the end of each line
  --no-spaces   don't add spaces around =
  -c, --color   colorize output
  --no-color    don't colorize output

The file name can be - or missing, in that case the data is read from stdin.

json = []
json[0] = {}
json[0].one = 1
json[0].two = 2
json[0].three = []
json[0].three[0] = 1
json[0].three[1] = 2
json[0].three[2] = 3
json[1] = {}
json[1].one = 1
json[1].two = 2
json[1].three = []
json[1].three[0] = 1
json[1].three[1] = 2
json[1].three[2] = 3

While there's a 50x speedup for converting JSON to GRON, gron is not able to convert a 800MB file back to JSON.

It takes 8s for fastgron to convert the 840MB file back to JSON.

citylots.json can be downloaded here: https://github.com/zemirco/sf-city-lots-json/blob/master/citylots.json

time fastgron ~/Downloads/citylots.json > /dev/null
fastgron ~/Downloads/citylots.json > /dev/null  0.38s user 0.07s system 99% cpu 0.447 total

time gron --no-sort ~/Downloads/citylots.json  >/dev/null
gron --no-sort ~/Downloads/citylots.json > /dev/null  27.60s user 30.73s system 158% cpu 36.705 total

time fastgron --sort ~/Downloads/citylots.json > /dev/null
fastgron --sort ~/Downloads/citylots.json > /dev/null  1.05s user 0.41s system 99% cpu 1.464 total

time gron ~/Downloads/citylots.json > /dev/null
gron ~/Downloads/citylots.json > /dev/null 52.34s user 48.46s system 117% cpu 1:25.80 total

time fastgron ~/Downloads/citylots.json | rg UTAH
json.features[132396].properties.STREET = "UTAH"
json.features[132434].properties.STREET = "UTAH"
json.features[132438].properties.STREET = "UTAH"
json.features[132480].properties.STREET = "UTAH"
...
json.features[139041].properties.STREET = "UTAH"
json.features[139489].properties.STREET = "UTAH"
fastgron ~/Downloads/citylots.json  0.39s user 0.11s system 80% cpu 0.629 total
rg UTAH  0.07s user 0.05s system 19% cpu 0.629 total

time fastgron -u citylots.gson > c2.json
fastgron -u citylots.gson > c2.json  5.62s user 0.47s system 99% cpu 6.122 total

time gron -u citylots.gson > c3.json
[2]    8270 killed     gron -u citylots.gson > c3.json
gron -u citylots.gson > c3.json  66.99s user 61.06s system 189% cpu 1:07.75 total

Path finding is 18x faster than jq and 5x faster than jj:

• jq: 3.252s

  $ time jq -cM ".features[10000].properties.LOT_NUM" < ~/Downloads/citylots.json
  "091"
  jq -cM ".features[10000].properties.LOT_NUM" < ~/Downloads/citylots.json  2.91s user 0.28s system 97% cpu 3.252 total

• jj: 0.972s

  $ time jj -r features.10000.properties.LOT_NUM < ~/Downloads/citylots.json
  "091"
  jj -r features.10000.properties.LOT_NUM < ~/Downloads/citylots.json  0.87s user 0.71s system 161% cpu 0.972 total

• fastgron: 0.176s

  $ time build/fastgron .features.10000.properties.LOT_NUM < ~/Downloads/citylots.json
  json.features[10000].properties.LOT_NUM = "091"
  build/fastgron .features.10000.properties.LOT_NUM < ~/Downloads/citylots.json  0.07s user 0.10s system 95% cpu 0.176 total

To build and run this project, you need:

• A C 20 compatible compiler
• CMake (version 3.8 or higher)
• libcurl installed (Optional)

1. Enable Flakes locally.
2. Run nix build to build the fastgron binary locally.

For a development environment, either:

• Enable direnv in your shell then approve the use of .envrc via direnv allow or
• explicitly enter a development shell via nix develop.

Here are the steps to build, test, and install fastgron:

apt install cmake clang libcurl4-openssl-dev libssl-dev zlib1g-dev
git clone https://github.com/adamritter/fastgron.git
cd fastgron
cmake -B build  -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=/usr/bin/clang   && cmake --build build
cmake install build/

• Paths: Implement more complex path queries: using *, [] , multiple exlusive paths using {}. {} also could be extended for allowing simple path renaming and value setting, like {.name:.author.name,.address:.author.address,is_person:true}
• Path autocompletion is much better with gron type paths than js style functions, the code should take advantage of it
• memory mapping would be great, but it depends on the underlying SIMDJSON library not needing padding.
• CSV support would probably be helpful (using csv2 header only library for example), as there are some big CSV files out there. toml / yaml support is not out of the question, but I don't know about people using it in general
• multiple file support would probably be great, which would make it easy to merge multiple files (especially with giving different --root values to different files)
• after the filters get useful enough, directly outputting JSON is also an option, it can be much faster than gron and then ungron together, as there's no need to build up maps of values
• for streaming / ndjson, multi-threaded implementation should be used
• the code should be accessible as a library as well, especially when it gets more powerful
• simply appending GRON code, like setting some paths/values maybe a useful simple feature
• A fastjq implementation could be created from the learnings of this project
• --skip-initializations, --output-json
• Beat other benchmarks: https://colab.research.google.com/github/dcmoura/spyql/blob/master/notebooks/json_benchmark.ipynb#scrollTo=Ub3wTHktDQtX