Output Formats

Which formats are available depends on the command.

Command	Formats	Default	Destination
analyze	html, json, text	html	HTML to a file, the others to standard output
check	text, --json	text	Standard output
deps	text, json, dot	text	Standard output, or --output

Choosing a format

HTML is the format to use when a person is going to read the results. It ranks findings, groups them by category, and is the only format that shows the full clone comparison side by side. See the HTML report.

Text is for a quick look in the terminal and for pasting into an issue. It contains everything the HTML report does, in reading order rather than ranked order.

JSON is for anything programmatic: a dashboard, a script that tracks the score over time, or a bot that comments on pull requests. See the JSON schema.

DOT applies to jscan deps only, and produces a Graphviz document for rendering the dependency graph as an image.

Standard output and standard error

This matters when you redirect output in a script.

For jscan analyze --json, the JSON document goes to standard output and the human-readable score summary goes to standard error. That separation is deliberate, and it means the following works:

jscan analyze --json src/ > report.json     # report.json holds valid JSON
jscan analyze --json src/ 2> /dev/null      # summary suppressed, JSON kept

For jscan analyze --text, everything goes to standard output, because the text report already ends with its own score section and printing it twice would be noise.

For jscan analyze in HTML mode, the report goes to the file and the summary goes to standard output.

Progress bars are written only when the output is an interactive terminal, so redirecting to a file never captures escape sequences.

Exit codes

Only jscan check varies its exit code by result. Every other command exits 0 on success and 1 on an internal error.

Command	0	1	2
analyze	Analysis completed	Could not run	not used
check	All checks passed	A threshold was violated	Could not run
deps	Analysis completed	Could not run	not used
init	File written	Could not write	not used

An individual analysis failing inside analyze does not fail the command. jscan prints the error to standard error and reports the categories that did succeed, so a parse failure in one file never costs you the whole run.

The health score

Every format that carries a summary includes a health score from 0 to 100 and a letter grade. It is computed identically in all of them. See the health score page for the formula.

Report file location

The HTML report is written to jscan-report.html in the current working directory. Change it with --output:

jscan analyze --output reports/quality.html src/

The directory must already exist. jscan does not create intermediate directories, and the command fails if the path cannot be opened for writing.