What does HackerNews think of libxo?

The libxo library allows an application to generate text, XML, JSON, and HTML output using a common set of function calls. The application decides at run time which output style should be produced.

Language: C

#2 in HTML
#5 in JSON
#1 in XML
Getting work done with PowerShell on Linux | Feb 2023
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Or make it flexible:

> libxo - A Library for Generating Text, XML, JSON, and HTML Output

* https://github.com/Juniper/libxo/

* https://wiki.freebsd.org/LibXo

Want structure? Ask for JSON or XML and parse. Otherwise it's the regular text output.
JC – JSONifies the output of many CLI tools | Nov 2022
Can you trust it? Cli tool output is not exactly stable. I thought that's why libxo exists?

https://github.com/Juniper/libxo

The growth of command line options, 1979-Present (2020) | Dec 2021
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Something like https://github.com/Juniper/libxo is probably the best bet for non-powershell, non-python like things to ever be properly parseable.
Tips on adding JSON output to your CLI app | Dec 2021
See also libxo:

> The libxo library allows an application to generate text, XML, JSON, and HTML output using a common set of function calls. The application decides at run time which output style should be produced. The application calls a function "xo_emit" to product output that is described in a format string. A "field descriptor" tells libxo what the field is and what it means.

* https://github.com/Juniper/libxo

Then add an "--output-format" option.

GitHub – nushell/nushell: A new type of shell | Jun 2021
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You're not the first person to think of that. See Juniper's libxo: https://github.com/Juniper/libxo

It's integrated into a lot of FreeBSD's command line tooling, and is very useful, when it's available.
Linux and Powershell | Jan 2021
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Ah, that's interesting, thanks for sharing. Their github README does a nice job of showing how it doesn't add a lot of work: https://github.com/Juniper/libxo
Illustrated Jq Tutorial | Mar 2020
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Though it's pretty immature, nushell has a similar idea, with its own internal data model being streams of structured, typed data: https://www.nushell.sh/

And back to nix commands, libxo is used by a chunk of the FreeBSD base tools to offer output in JSON, amongst other things: https://github.com/Juniper/libxo

    -% ps --libxo=json,pretty
    {
      "process-information": {
        "process": [
          {
            "pid": "52455",
            "terminal-name": "5 ",
            "state": "Is",
            "cpu-time": "0:00.00",
            "command": "-sh (sh)"
          },

    -% uptime --libxo=json,pretty
    {
      "uptime-information": {
        "time-of-day": " 8:34p.m.",
        "uptime": 1730360,
        "days": 20,
Be nice to see more tools converted.
The Man Behind Windows PowerShell | Sep 2017
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Object-oriented piping is actually somewhat problematic, because objects carry behavior, not just data. This means that everyone in the pipeline now has to agree on the semantics of that behavior - in case of PowerShell, they need to understand and talk the .NET object model, for example.

A much more lightweight approach is to exchange structured data. This can even be easily done on top of existing byte streams, just standardizing the format.

FreeBSD started adopting this approach via libxo for its base utilities: https://github.com/Juniper/libxo. I hope it spreads into Linux.