Pretty-Printing JSON with PHP

Question

I\'m building a PHP script that feeds JSON data to another script. My script builds data into a large associative array, and then outputs the data using json_encode

Answer 1

I realize this question is asking about how to encode an associative array to a pretty-formatted JSON string, so this doesn't directly answer the question, but if you have a string that is already in JSON format, you can make it pretty simply by decoding and re-encoding it (requires PHP >= 5.4):

$json = json_encode(json_decode($json), JSON_PRETTY_PRINT);

Example:

header('Content-Type: application/json');
$json_ugly = '{"a":1,"b":2,"c":3,"d":4,"e":5}';
$json_pretty = json_encode(json_decode($json_ugly), JSON_PRETTY_PRINT);
echo $json_pretty;

This outputs:

{
    "a": 1,
    "b": 2,
    "c": 3,
    "d": 4,
    "e": 5
}