This was mostly an experiment to learn go and test using closures to interpret a JSON path. You should use https://github.com/PaesslerAG/jsonpath instead.

a (partial) implementation in Go based on Stefan Goener JSON Path

• No support for subexpressions : $books[(@.length-1)]
• No support for filters : $books[?(@.price > 10)]
• Strings in brackets must use double quotes : $["bookstore"]
• Cannot operate on struct fields

The third limitation comes from using the text/scanner package from the standard library. The last one could be overcome by using reflection.

All expressions start $.

Examples (supported by the current implementation) :

• $ the current object (or array)
• $.books access to the key of an object (or $["books"]with bracket syntax)
• $.books[1] access to the index of an array
• $.books[1].authors[1].name chaining of keys and index
• $["books"][1]["authors"][1]["name"] the same with braket syntax
• $.books[0,1,3] union on an array
• $["books", "songs", "movies"] union on an object
• $books[1:3] second and third items of an array
• $books[:-2:2] every two items except the last two of an array
• $books[::-1] all items in reversed order
• $..authors all authors (recursive search)

Checkout the tests for more examples.

go get github.com/yalp/jsonpath

A jsonpath applies to any JSON decoded data using interface{} when decoded with encoding/json :

var bookstore interface{}
err := json.Unmarshal(data, &bookstore)
authors, err := jsonpath.Read(bookstore, "$..authors")

A jsonpath expression can be prepared to be reused multiple times :

allAuthors, err = jsonpath.Prepare("$..authors")
...
var bookstore interface{}
err := json.Unmarshal(data, &bookstore)
authors, err := allAuthors(bookstore)

The type of the values returned by the Read method or Prepare functions depends on the jsonpath expression.