jq Regex Operations: match vs test vs scan vs capture – A Complete Guide

The match filter returns detailed match objects with offsets and captures, test returns a boolean for existence checks, scan extracts all matching strings globally, and capture returns an object of named capture groups—all implemented in src/builtin.c using the Oniguruma regex engine.

jq ships with a powerful Perl-compatible regular expression engine via Oniguruma, exposing four distinct primitives for pattern matching. Understanding the differences between match, test, scan, and capture in jq regex operations is essential for writing