How can I pretty-print a JSON file from the command line?

Question

I\'ve a file with a sequence of JSON element:

{ element0: \"lorem\", value0: \"ipsum\" }
{ element1: \"lorem\", value0: \"ipsum\" }
...
{ elementN: \"lorem\"         


        

Answer 1

You can use jq package which can be installed in all Linux systems. Install the tool using below commands.

# Redhat based systems(Centos)
yum install -y epel-release
yum install -y jq

# Debian based systems
apt install -y jq

Then you will be able to pipe text streams to the jq tool.

echo '{"test":"value", "test2":"value2"}' | jq

Hope this answer will help.

Answer 2

There are a bunch of them. I personally have this alias in my .zshrc

pjson () {
        ~/bin/pjson.py | less -X
}

where pjson.py is

#!/usr/bin/env python

import json
import sys

try:
    input_str = sys.stdin.read()
    print json.dumps(json.loads(input_str), sort_keys = True, indent = 2)
except ValueError,e:
    print "Couldn't decode \n %s \n Error : %s"%(input_str, str(e))

Allows me to use that in a command line as a pipe (something like curl http://.... | pjson).

OTOH, Custom code is a liability so there's jq, which to me looks like the gold standard. It's written in C (and is hence portable with no dependencies like Python or Node), does much more than just pretty printing and is fast.

Answer 3

Pipe the results from the file into the python json tool 2.6 onwards

cat 'file_name' | python -m json.tool

Answer 4

To format your JSON with proper indentation use JSON.stringify

console.log(JSON.stringify(your_object, null, 2)); // prints in b/w

But to make it prettier by adding colors, you can check out my package beautify-json

beautify-json

Example:

const { jsonBeautify } = require('beautify-json')

let your_object = {
    name: 'Nikhil',
    age: 22,
    isMarried: false,
    girlfriends: null,
    interestedIn: [
        'javascript',
        'reactjs',
        'nodejs'
    ]
}

jsonBeautify(your_object) // It will beautify your object with colors and proper indentation and display it on the terminal

Output:

Answer 5

Colored output using Pygmentize + Python json.tool

Pygmentize is a killer tool. See this. I combine python json.tool with pygmentize

echo '{"foo": "bar"}' | python -m json.tool | pygmentize -g

For other similar tools and installation instruction see the answer linked above.

Here is a live demo:

Answer 6

From a mac OS 10.15 terminal I can use json_pp:

echo '{ "element0" : "lorem", "element1" : "ipsum" }' | json_pp