I've built a pure-Perl module inspired by the awesome jq command-line tool.

👉 JQ::Lite on MetaCPAN
👉 GitHub repo

🔧 Features

• Pure Perl — no XS, no C, no external jq binary

• Dot notation: .users[].name

• Optional key access: .nickname?

• Filters with select(...): ==, !=, <, >, and, or

• Built-in functions: length, keys, sort, reverse, first, last, has, unique

• Array indexing & expansion

• Command-line tool: jq-lite (reads from stdin or file)

• Interactive mode: explore JSON line-by-line in terminal

🐪 Example (in Perl)

use JQ::Lite;

my $json = '{"users":[{"name":"Alice"},{"name":"Bob"}]}';
my $jq = JQ::Lite->new;
my u/names = $jq->run_query($json, '.users[].name');
print join("\n", @names), "\n";

🖥️ Command-line (UNIX/Windows)

cat users.json | jq-lite '.users[].name'
jq-lite '.users[] | select(.age > 25)' users.json

type users.json | jq-lite ".users[].name"

Interactive mode:

jq-lite users.json

I made this for those times when you need jq-style JSON parsing inside a Perl script, or want a lightweight jq-alternative in environments where installing external binaries isn't ideal.

Any feedback, bug reports, or stars ⭐ on GitHub are very welcome!
Cheers!