I wanted to use the Az CLI command to find the shortcode of a location. You know: “UAE North” == “uaenorth”<\/p>\n
This command gives you a list of locations and their shortcode and other details:<\/p>\n
az account list-locations<\/pre>\nThis is fine and I could scroll through the output to see the shortcode I was interested in, but I thought it would be fun if I can pipe it through jq<\/a> to get exactly what I want.<\/p>\n
That didn’t work though as I kept getting the following:<\/p>\n
parse error: Invalid numeric literal at line 3, column 6<\/pre>\nTurns out this is because jq cannot parse the input<\/a> correctly. This stumped me for a while until I realized that the Az commands have an “–output json” switch to output in JSON. So while the default output looks like it’s JSON, it’s actually formatted and not really JSON.<\/p>\n
Here’s a typical output entry for a location:<\/p>\n
{\n \"displayName\": \"Norway West\",\n \"id\": \"\/subscriptions\/abb820ca-1608-42f6-a7ac-ce779822a4cb\/locations\/norwaywest\",\n \"latitude\": \"58.969975\",\n \"longitude\": \"5.733107\",\n \"name\": \"norwaywest\",\n \"subscriptionId\": null\n },<\/pre>\nWhat I get is an array of JSON entries like the above.<\/p>\n
If I want a list of locations and their shortcodes I can do something like the following:<\/p>\n
az account list-locations --output json | jq '.[] | {display: .displayName, name: .name}'<\/pre>\nWhat I am doing here is piping this to jq. And I tell jq to expect an array and iterate through it (that’s what the
.[]<\/code> does). Then I tell jq to select just the “displayName” and “name” elements from each JSON entry in this array, call these “displayName” and “name”, and output this as JSON (that’s what the{}<\/code> around part of the commands do). The output looks like this:<\/p>\n{\n \"display\": \"Norway West\",\n \"name\": \"norwaywest\"\n}<\/pre>\nIf I don’t want an output as JSON I can skip the
{}<\/code> and do something like this:<\/p>\naz account list-locations --output json | jq '.[] | .displayName, .name'<\/pre>\nThis just returns a list of locations and shortcodes and isn’t very pretty:<\/p>\n
\"Switzerland West\"\n\"switzerlandwest\"\n\"Germany North\"\n\"germanynorth\"\n\"Germany West Central\"\n\"germanywestcentral\"<\/pre>\nNow, back to my original problem. I am only interested in the shortcode of the location I am interested in, so I don’t really need a list. Instead I can do something like this:<\/p>\n
az account list-locations --output json | jq '.[] | select(.displayName == \"UAE North\") | .name'<\/pre>\nI use the
select<\/code> operator here to find the entry whose “displayName” matches what I am interested in. The result is a single shortcode.<\/p>\n\"uaenorth\"<\/pre>\nIf I want the result to be JSON I can enclose it around
{}<\/code> like I did earlier and also add a label.\u00a0<\/p>\naz account list-locations --output json | jq '.[] | select(.displayName == \"UAE North\") | { \"code\": .name }'<\/pre>\nThe result looks like this:<\/p>\n
{\n \"code\": \"uaenorth\"\n}<\/pre>\nTo make it easier for the future, I created a Bash function out of this:<\/p>\n
function az_location { \n az account list-locations --output json | jq --arg displayName \"$1\" '.[] | select(.displayName == $displayName) | { \"code\": .name }'\n}<\/pre>\nIt’s similar to the above just that I have to pass the argument I give the function over to jq. For this I have to use the
--args<\/code> switch which lets me define a new internal variable called “displayName” which has the value of the argument I give the function ($1<\/code> in this case, in quotes so I capture strings with spaces). When I use this variable as$displayName<\/code> in jq later, I should skip the double quotes (figured this out via trial and error).<\/p>\nThat’s all, now I can simply do
az_location \"UAE North\"<\/code> and get my answer!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I wanted to use the Az CLI command to find the shortcode of a location. You know: “UAE North” == “uaenorth” This command gives you a list of locations and their shortcode and other details: az account list-locations This is fine and I could scroll through the output to see the shortcode I was interested … Continue reading Az CLI find location shortcode<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[887,102],"tags":[893,503],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rakhesh.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4661"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rakhesh.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rakhesh.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rakhesh.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rakhesh.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4661"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rakhesh.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4661\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rakhesh.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rakhesh.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rakhesh.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}