How to update/merge object inside an array with specific key: value

[strudelPi]

Hey folks,

My goal is checking a nested object inside an array of those objects for a specific key: value and if missing, update it.

e.g.

metadata:
  - important:
    name: Jonas
    phone: 123
  - lessImportant:
    age: 12
objects:
  - name: hello
    number: 7
  - name: hello2
    number: 6
  - name: hello
    number: 2

for this document, I would like to update an object with number: 2 with e.g. new: yes

Now my problem here is, using .objects[] | select(.number == 2) | .new = "yes" but doing this, I am now in the narrow context with just:

name: hello
number: 2
new: yes

but what I need is to rewrite the original file. The --in-place won't help me as it will change the file in place but just with this and I would loose the original data. Unfortunately I found no documentation mentioning on how to get back to the context of the whole file in order for yq to print out the whole thing.

Another thing I tried was merging the result with the original file, with no success as I would need a deep merge of the object I am merging but I need that for the specific array index where number: 2 which according to this is not possible in yq.

Any suggestions? I think I'm just missing some very simple workflow with yq since this seems like a pretty basic usecase.

Thanks for any answers :-)

[mikefarah]

Tip: You need to put brackets around the whole LHS:

(.objects[] | select(.number == 2) | .new) = "yes"

I'll put this in the troubleshooting docs.

Otherwise what you are doing is first filtering your yaml content, and then updating the new field

[mikefarah]

See https://mikefarah.gitbook.io/yq/operators/assign-update#update-selected-results for an example

[mikefarah]

Also added this: https://mikefarah.gitbook.io/yq/usage/tips-and-tricks#updating-deeply-selected-paths

[strudelPi]

Also added this: https://mikefarah.gitbook.io/yq/usage/tips-and-tricks#updating-deeply-selected-paths

Thanks for this, @mikefarah ! this actually really helps.

Thought I'd still like to add, maybe this is something very obvious for a jq users, but for me, even though I now know how to do it, I'm not entirely sure how exactly the contexts work in yq and think some explanation in the README on this topic would actually help a lot. If I wasn't looking for some of the keywords you added in this Tips and Tricks section, I don't think I would find it.