json is not syntax highlighted when piped in from jq

[danwt]

json is not syntax highlighted when piped in from jq

[walles]

There are three(ish) ways to handle this:

• jq < hello.json | moar --lang=json will tell moar the input is JSON, and moar will highlight it.
• jq --color-output < hello.json | moar will tell jq to send colored output to moar.
• moar hello.json will tell moar the input is JSON (based on the .json extension) and moar will highlight it.

The root cause is that jq sends an untyped non-highlighted stream to moar, so moar doesn't know the input is JSON, and can't highlight it.

Note that when you do just jq < hello.json, jq will color its output because it's going to a terminal.

But if you do jq < hello.json | cat, jq will not color its output, because it's going to a stream.

Does this answer your question?

[danwt]

Yes thanks

I suppose you don't want to have a feature for moar to automatically check various common syntaxes for highlighting?

[walles]

Thinking about it, it should be possible to have moar check for JSON specifically using Go's standard JSON library.

Thanks for the inspiration, let me ponder this.