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jq `splits` vs `split` in Streaming Mode: What Every Developer Needs to Know

April 11, 2026 jqlang/jq ↗

Use splits to emit a stream of individual substrings for memory-efficient processing with --stream, while split collects all matches into an array and breaks the streaming pipeline.

When working with large JSON datasets in the jqlang/jq repository, choosing between splits and split directly impacts memory usage and processing speed. While both filters divide strings using regular expressions or literal separators, they differ fundamentally in their output types—one produces a stream of values and the other an array—making `jq splits

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