Simon Krenger

When working with JSON data, I typically use jq to mangle the data. I keep this post as a reference for myself on how to remove an element from a JSON list or array using jq.

Given we have the following array:

$ echo '{"hello": "world", "myarray": ["a", "b", "c"]}' | jq
{
  "hello": "world",
  "myarray": [
    "a",
    "b",
    "c"
  ]
}

To remove an element from the array, use the del function with the select function to select a single element:

jq 'del(.myarray[] | select(. == "b"))'

So when applying this to the above array, we can remove “b” from the array like so:

$ echo '{"hello": "world", "myarray": ["a", "b", "c"]}' | jq 'del(.myarray[] | select(. == "b"))'
{
  "hello": "world",
  "myarray": [
    "a",
    "c"
  ]
}