Thank you for this life-changing language. I regret that my first correspondence is a complaint.

Try-catch returns empty following filter assignment.

Input

 jq -nc '{foo: "bar"} | .foo |= .?'  

Expected output

 {"foo":"bar"}

Actual output

{}

Furthermore, // is unable to catch the result:

$ jq -nc '{foo: "bar"} | .foo |= ( .? // "baz" )'
{}

Environment (please complete the following information):

• Debian Stretch, jq 1.5
• jqplay, jq 1.6

This is an extremely minimized example; I'm actually trying to process incoming strings which may or may not contain valid JSON, as in .value |= (fromjson? // .). I catch some undocumented error formatting when I try this:

$ jq -nc '{value: "[]"} | .value |= try fromjson catch .'
{"value":{"__jq":0}}

Thanks again for your efforts.