Okay I'll give up for now. There are really no spaces in front of the lines. In pastebin if you check the raw version you'll see they are tabs. Which get stripped out because I added a `-` before eof. Providing the file manually to flex also produces the same gibberish for me.
I tried this but ended up with gibberish in my terminal. Also couldn't find an explanation for -a on flex's man page. I've never used the thing before.
This is a wrapper to jq that also supports yaml and other file formats.