pretty-print JSON using JavaScript

Question

How can I display JSON in an easy-to-read (for human readers) format? I\'m looking primarily for indentation and whitespace, with perhaps even colors / font-styles / etc.

Answer 1

Based on Pumbaa80's answer I have modified the code to use the console.log colours (working on Chrome for sure) and not HTML. Output can be seen inside console. You can edit the _variables inside the function adding some more styling.

function JSONstringify(json) {
    if (typeof json != 'string') {
        json = JSON.stringify(json, undefined, '\t');
    }

    var 
        arr = [],
        _string = 'color:green',
        _number = 'color:darkorange',
        _boolean = 'color:blue',
        _null = 'color:magenta',
        _key = 'color:red';

    json = json.replace(/("(\\u[a-zA-Z0-9]{4}|\\[^u]|[^\\"])*"(\s*:)?|\b(true|false|null)\b|-?\d+(?:\.\d*)?(?:[eE][+\-]?\d+)?)/g, function (match) {
        var style = _number;
        if (/^"/.test(match)) {
            if (/:$/.test(match)) {
                style = _key;
            } else {
                style = _string;
            }
        } else if (/true|false/.test(match)) {
            style = _boolean;
        } else if (/null/.test(match)) {
            style = _null;
        }
        arr.push(style);
        arr.push('');
        return '%c' + match + '%c';
    });

    arr.unshift(json);

    console.log.apply(console, arr);
}

Here is a bookmarklet you can use:

javascript:function JSONstringify(json) {if (typeof json != 'string') {json = JSON.stringify(json, undefined, '\t');}var arr = [],_string = 'color:green',_number = 'color:darkorange',_boolean = 'color:blue',_null = 'color:magenta',_key = 'color:red';json = json.replace(/("(\\u[a-zA-Z0-9]{4}|\\[^u]|[^\\"])*"(\s*:)?|\b(true|false|null)\b|-?\d+(?:\.\d*)?(?:[eE][+\-]?\d+)?)/g, function (match) {var style = _number;if (/^"/.test(match)) {if (/:$/.test(match)) {style = _key;} else {style = _string;}} else if (/true|false/.test(match)) {style = _boolean;} else if (/null/.test(match)) {style = _null;}arr.push(style);arr.push('');return '%c' + match + '%c';});arr.unshift(json);console.log.apply(console, arr);};void(0);

Usage:

var obj = {a:1, 'b':'foo', c:[false,null, {d:{e:1.3e5}}]};
JSONstringify(obj);

Edit: I just tried to escape the % symbol with this line, after the variables declaration:

json = json.replace(/%/g, '%%');

But I find out that Chrome is not supporting % escaping in the console. Strange... Maybe this will work in the future.

Cheers!