Evidently one of the items in the array is a string. If your jq supports "?", then one possibility would be to use it:

.response[].text?

Another would be to check the type explicitly, e.g.:

.response[] | objects | .text

Yet another possibility:

.response[] | select(type=="object" and has("text")) | .text

If you want to have a placeholder value when there is no "text" field:

 .response[] | if type=="object" and has("text") then .text else null end

So it really depends on your requirements and perhaps the version of jq that you are using.

I think this is fairly easy to achieve for this inner list. The values seem to be all zero's so...

jq  '.[][1]' < yourjsonfile

Just to provide another approach. When working with lists, dicts and other types python is the right tool. To give you an idea on how you could retrieve the values from the list you'd do something lik:

#!/usr/bin/env python

mylist = [[1645128660000,0],[1645128720000,0],[1645128780000,0],[1645128840000,0],[1645128900000,0],[1645128960000,0],[1645129020000,0],[1645129080000,0],[1645129140000,0],[1645129200000,0]]

for k,v in mylist:
    print("Key":,k)
    print("Value":v)

Or using list comprehension

[v for k,v in mylist]

should be sufficient. There is also this awesome page where you can play around with jq: https://jqplay.org/#

The -r option should not be used if the output will be fed into another JSON parser; only the last jq in the pipeline should use it – otherwise you risk feeding non-JSON data into the second jq instance.

Your last example with .[0].t seems correct and works with jq 1.6.

$ cat json | jq '.tx' | jq -r '.[0].t'
t for a

But this can be simplified to a single jq invocation, first incrementally to:

$ cat json | jq -r '.tx | .[0].t'
t for a

and then finally to:

$ cat json | jq -r '.tx[0].t'
t for a

This is what .[] does for objects:

You can also use this on an object, and it will return all the values of the object.

To get your exact result, you would also need jq -r/--raw-output to omit the JSON string quotation marks:

jq -r '.[]' foo.json