> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://daseldocs.tomwright.me/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://daseldocs.tomwright.me/input-output/stdout.md).

# Stdout

Dasel writes to stdout.

You can modify the output with the `-o`, `--out` flag passing the required format, e.g. `json`, `yaml` etc.

```
$ echo '{"message": "Hello world"}' | dasel -i json -o yaml
message: Hello world
```

## Getting the output you want

Dasel will output the result of the final expression by default, however in some cases it can be useful to output the input document, e.g.

### Default behaviour

```
$ echo '{"user": {"name": "John"}}' |
    dasel -i json 'user.name = {"first": user.name, "last": "Doe"}'

// outputs
{"first": "John", "last": "Doe"}
```

### With --root

<pre><code>$ echo '{"user": {"name": "John"}}' |
    dasel -i json --root 'user.name = {"first": user.name, "last": "Doe"}'

// outputs
<strong>{"user": {"name": {"first": "John", "last": "Doe"}}}
</strong></code></pre>

## Compact output

By default, dasel pretty-prints structured output with indentation and newlines. Use the `--compact` flag to produce compact output with no extra whitespace.

This is supported for JSON, TOML, YAML, and XML formats.

```
$ echo '{"name": "Tom", "age": 30}' | dasel -i json -o json --compact
{"name":"Tom","age":30}
```

```
$ echo '<Root><Name>Tom</Name></Root>' | dasel -i xml -o xml --compact
<Root><Name>Tom</Name></Root>
```