jq and multi-field output to CSV

jq is some of the most underrated tools out there I think. It’s a command line JSON parser that makes it super easy to work with JSON on the command line and in turn makes developing small SalesforceDX tools a breeze. Today I needed to generate a CSV file of all fields from different objects for the integration team that doesn’t have access to Salesforce. Doing the describe is easy using the Salesforce REST API but when using jq different are usually on different lines like below (-r is a nifty switch for getting raw, unquoted strings).

$ sfdx force:schema:sobject:describe -s Account -u myorg --json | jq -r ".result.fields[] | .label, .name"
Age
Age__pc
PO Box
PO_Box__pc
Postal Code Before City
Postal_Code_Before_City__pc
Street No Before Street
Street_No_Before_Street__pc
Archived State
Archived_State__pc

The output is almost what I wanted but really wanted not  to have to edit the file manually to build the output. Some quick googling and it appears that jq supports both CSV and tabular output from arrays. So fixing the issue was as simple as follows:

$ sfdx force:schema:sobject:describe -s Account -u myorg --json | jq -r ".result.fields[] | [.label, .name] | @csv"
"Age","Age__pc"
"PO Box","PO_Box__pc"
"Postal Code Before City","Postal_Code_Before_City__pc"
"Street No Before Street","Street_No_Before_Street__pc"
"Archived State","Archived_State__pc"

This is so cool… Love it!!