Output formats: --as

The data inspect command produces a table of records and accepts an --as flag selecting how that table is rendered.

--as display    pretty table, headers, Unicode glyphs
--as tsv        tab-separated values, one row per line
--as json       a JSON object describing the report

The display and tsv forms describe the same records; the json form additionally carries the faithful underlying values (an integer stays a JSON integer, a real a JSON number), which makes it suitable for scripting.

Default per output stream

Without --as, the format is chosen from whether standard output is a terminal:

stdout	Default	Why
Terminal (interactive)	display	Headers and alignment make the records legible at a glance.
Pipe or redirect	tsv	One row per line, stable column order, no decorative chrome, so awk, cut and column -t get parseable input.

Override the default explicitly with --as whenever the context calls for the other form.

Lossless round-trips use decode

The --as json output of inspect is a report — keyed by column, wrapped in report metadata — and is meant for reading. To move data files in and out of JSON losslessly, use the decode and encode commands instead: their JSON is a plain array of values that encode reads back to reproduce the file byte-for-byte.