If you read your data with JSON, you can use grep in the intended way, see below. However, the SQL you provided would not return any records for the example data as none of the fields equals 'taco'. So I have been using matching instead of test for equality below and I am testing only two fields. HTH.

use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;
use JSON;

my $json = <<'JSON';
{
   "People" : [
      {
         "name" : "bob",
         "title" : "janitor",
         "email" : "taco@blah.com",
         "iq" : "180",
         "favorite_food" : "wagyu steak"
      },
      {
         "name" : "joe",
         "title" : "software engineer",
         "email" : "",
         "iq" : "80",
         "favorite_food" : "raw hamburger"
      },
      {
         "name" : "sandy",
         "title" : "dishwasher",
         "email" : "",
         "iq" : "240",
         "favorite_food" : "tacos"
      },
      {
         "name" : "george",
         "title" : "software engineer",
         "email" : "",
         "iq" : "14",
         "favorite_food" : "tacos"
      }
   ]   
}
JSON

my $j = JSON->new->decode($json);

my @results2 = grep { $_->{email} =~ /taco/ or $_->{favorite_food} =~ 
+/taco/ } @{ $j->{People} };
print Dumper \@results2;
[download]

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!!! That perfectly solved my issue; though I'm not entirely sure how to grep the value of all keys without knowing what they keys are named, but that much I can figure out. I really appreciate the fast help! Thanks again ;)

Update


Figured it out:

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;
use JSON::XS;
use File::Slurp qw(read_file);

my $lines = decode_json( read_file("test.json") );
my @results = grep { grep { $_ =~ /taco/ } values %$_ } @{ $lines };

print Dumper \@results;
[download]

Thanks again hdb!

With a simple hash, to grep the keys:

my @results = grep /taco/, keys %hash;

To grep the values:

my @results = grep /taco/, values %hash;

To get the keys whose values match a regex:

my @results = map {$hash{$_} =~ /taco/ ? $_:  ()} keys %hash;

TWIMC, see also PostgreSQL 9.3 JSON functions and JSON data type.

(PostgreSQL version 9.3 will be released next week (if it's ready))

(Update 2021) For future reference:

JSON Functions, incl. detail on JSON indexing

JSON data types (note the plural)

( TL/DR: with PostgreSQL, use JSONB instead of JSON. JSONB (binary JSON) has better indexing and other advantages. )

Both pages contain details about postgresql support for JSONPATH (SQL Standard compliant, indexable, very fast).

When I can choose, I choose XML::LibXML, there is XPath to query XML structures.

Something kind of /People[@name='taco' or @title='taco' or @email='taco' or @iq='taco' or @favoritefood='taco']