mistaken use of kebab case could use a better error message

[felix9]

If json keys are kebab case ("last-name"), it's natural to try something like

jq '.last-name'

which emits a confusing error message:

jq: error: name/0 is not defined at <top-level>, line 1:

this seems like a common enough problem that it might be worth making a special error message for expressions that look like that.

(alternatively, the jq language could support kebab-case literals. this might break some scripts, but it seems unlikely that anyone would deliberately write an expression that looks like kebab-case)

[itchyny]

Looking for the function is done in the compilation phase, and it is difficult (or making the code messy) to tell that the function is the right hand side of a binary expression which has indexing in the left hand side and .... Also can we know the difference between .last - name and .last-name in the compilation phase?

[felix9]

it looks to me like it wouldn't be too hard to add a heuristic check at the point of the error message. check if the source expression looks like unquoted skewer case, and suggest that might be the problem. I might have time/energy to write a POC patch this weekend

[wader]

For context me and @felix9 talked a bit about this on mastodon https://fosstodon.org/@[email protected]/113455083464066624 specially that there is two cases, a compile time and runtime time case, and probably the compile time case is more common and might be an easier case for heuristics?