There are several freely available tools for converting CSV files to JSON. For example, the `npm` package d3-dsv (`npm install -g d3-dsv`) includes a command-line program named csv2json, which expects the first line of the input file to be a header row, and uses these as keys. Such tools may be more convenient than jq for converting CSV files to JSON, not least because there are several "standard" CSV file formats.

For trivially simple CSV files, however, the jq invocation `jq -R 'split(",")'` can be used to convert each line to a JSON array. If the trivially simple CSV file has a row of headers, then as shown below, jq can also be used to produce a stream or array of objects using the header values as keys.

In this recipe, therefore, we will assume that either the CSV is trivially simple or that a suitable tool for performing the basic row-by-row conversion to JSON arrays is available. One such tool is [any-json](https://www.npmjs.com/package/any-json).

The following jq program expects as input an array, the first element of which is to be interpreted as a row of headers, and the other elements of which are to be interpreted as rows.