Babbel CLI (babbel-cli)

Universal, high-performance command-line utility for multi-format serialization, document querying, structural AST diffing, RFC 6902 patching, schema validation, and formatting across 16 data formats.

Installation

From Source

cargo install --path crates/cli

Verify installation:

babbel --version

Command Reference

1. babbel convert — Universal Cross-Format Conversion

Converts documents between any of the 16 supported formats with automatic format autodetection.

# Convert Terraform HCL to JSON
babbel convert main.tf -t json -o main.json

# Convert JSON to Apache Parquet
babbel convert data.json -t parquet -o data.parquet

# Pipe XML from stdin to YAML on stdout
cat config.xml | babbel convert - -f xml -t yaml --pretty

# Convert CBOR binary payload to compact MessagePack
babbel convert payload.cbor -t msgpack -o payload.msgpack

Options:

• -f, --from <FORMAT>: Source format (auto-detected from file extension if omitted).
• -t, --to <FORMAT>: Target format (json, yaml, toml, xml, cbor, msgpack, bson, ron, kdl, parquet, hcl, avro, csv, tsv, ini, bencode).
• -o, --output <PATH>: Output file path (defaults to stdout).
• --pretty: Pretty-print formatted output (default: true for text formats).
• --indent <N>: Indentation spaces for formatted text (default: 2).

2. babbel query — RFC 9535 JSONPath Document Querying

Executes standard JSONPath query expressions across any format without requiring format-specific tools.

# Query YAML configuration with filter expression
babbel query servers.yaml -q '$.servers[?(@.active == true)].ip'

# Extract the first matching element from a TOML file
babbel query Cargo.toml -q '$.package.name' --first

# Query an Avro container file
babbel query users.avro -q '$[*].name'

Options:

• -q, --query <EXPR>: RFC 9535 JSONPath expression (e.g. $.store.book[*].author).
• --first: Return only the first match instead of an array of matches.

3. babbel diff — Structural Document Diffing

Computes structural deltas between two documents, producing standard RFC 6902 JSON Patch operations or RFC 7396 Merge Patch representations.

# Compute RFC 6902 patch between original and modified configs
babbel diff config.v1.json config.v2.yaml

# Compute RFC 7396 Merge Patch
babbel diff old.toml new.toml --merge-patch

4. babbel patch — Atomic Document Patching

Applies an RFC 6902 JSON Patch or RFC 7396 Merge Patch file to a document.

# Apply RFC 6902 patch to update a configuration
babbel patch base.yaml -p update.patch.json -o updated.yaml

# Apply RFC 7396 Merge Patch
babbel patch config.json -p delta.json --merge-patch

5. babbel validate — JSON Schema Validation

Validates any document (JSON, YAML, TOML, XML, KDL, HCL, etc.) against a standard JSON Schema (Draft 7 / Draft 2020-12).

# Validate Kubernetes YAML manifest against schema
babbel validate deployment.yaml -s k8s-schema.json

# Validate TOML configuration
babbel validate config.toml -s schema.json

6. babbel fmt — Document Formatting & Pretty-Printing

Formats, validates syntax, and pretty-prints documents with customizable indentation.

# Pretty-print and format a minified JSON file in-place
babbel fmt messy.json -o clean.json --indent 4

7. babbel inspect — Document Diagnostics

Analyzes a document, displaying its detected format, AST data type, record count, byte size, and maximum nesting depth.

babbel inspect complex.avro

Output:

File: complex.avro
Detected Format: avro (application/avro)
Data Type: Array
Record Count: 3
Size: 265 bytes
Max Nesting Depth: 2

Supported Formats