Shameless plug: I've been toying with a "format-agnositic jq" for all of these object like formats: https://github.com/jzelinskie/faq

Here's an interesting example of using bencode which is the object format for BitTorrent:

      curl -sL https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/amd64/bt-cd/debian-9.4.0-amd64-netinst.iso.torrent | faq -f bencode 'del(.info.pieces)' -o json
      {
        "announce": "http://bttracker.debian.org:6969/announce",
        "comment": "\"Debian CD from cdimage.debian.org\"",
        "creation date": 1520682848,
        "httpseeds": [
          "https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/release/9.4.0//srv/cdbuilder.debian.org/dst/deb-cd/weekly-builds/amd64/iso-cd/debian-9.4.0-amd64-netinst.iso",
          "https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/archive/9.4.0//srv/cdbuilder.debian.org/dst/deb-cd/weekly-builds/amd64/iso-cd/debian-9.4.0-amd64-netinst.iso"
        ],
        "info": {
          "length": 305135616,
          "name": "debian-9.4.0-amd64-netinst.iso",
          "piece length": 262144
        }
      }