Any idea why the 2nd case not working in jq command?

I thought I had done a lot on jq command. But why the following 2 command, one is working, and the other fails ?

Working case:
echo '{"destinations": {"results": [{"sessions": "16903"}]}}' | jq '.destinations'

{
  "results": [
    {
      "sessions": "16903"
    }
  ]
}

Broken Case:

echo '{"pre-destinations": {"results": [{"sessions": "16903"}]}}' | jq '.pre-destinations'

jq: error: destinations/0 is not defined at <top-level>, line 1:
.pre-destinations
jq: 1 compile error

The root cause is I was using a '-' in the key value, but why it fails ?

Jack

Solution 1:

In the key named ".pre-destinations", the hyphen is regarded as a special character, so you would have to quote the key name, e.g.

jq '".pre-destinations"'

or more robustly (with respect to variations between different versions of jq):

jq '["pre-destinations"]'