How can I pretty-print JSON in a shell script?

Question

Is there a (Unix) shell script to format JSON in human-readable form?

Basically, I want it to transform the following:

{ \"foo\": \"lorem\", \"bar\":         


        

Answer 1

$ echo '{ "foo": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum" }' \
> | python -c'import fileinput, json;
> print(json.dumps(json.loads("".join(fileinput.input())),
>                  sort_keys=True, indent=4))'
{
    "bar": "ipsum",
    "foo": "lorem"
}

NOTE: It is not the way to do it.

The same in Perl:

$ cat json.txt \
> | perl -0007 -MJSON -nE'say to_json(from_json($_, {allow_nonref=>1}), 
>                                     {pretty=>1})'
{
   "bar" : "ipsum",
   "foo" : "lorem"
}

Note 2: If you run

echo '{ "Düsseldorf": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum" }' \
| python -c'import fileinput, json;
print(json.dumps(json.loads("".join(fileinput.input())),
                 sort_keys=True, indent=4))'

the nicely readable word becomes \u encoded

{
    "D\u00fcsseldorf": "lorem", 
    "bar": "ipsum"
}

If the remainder of your pipeline will gracefully handle unicode and you'd like your JSON to also be human-friendly, simply use ensure_ascii=False

echo '{ "Düsseldorf": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum" }' \
| python -c'import fileinput, json;
print json.dumps(json.loads("".join(fileinput.input())),
                 sort_keys=True, indent=4, ensure_ascii=False)'

and you'll get:

{
    "Düsseldorf": "lorem", 
    "bar": "ipsum"
}

Answer 2

Or, with Ruby:

echo '{ "foo": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum" }' | ruby -r json -e 'jj JSON.parse gets'

Answer 3

Pygmentize

I combine Python's json.tool with pygmentize:

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

There are some alternatives to pygmentize which are listed in my this answer.

Here is a live demo:

Answer 4

You can simply use standard tools like jq or json_pp.

echo '{ "foo": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum" }' | json_pp

or

echo '{ "foo": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum" }' | jq

will both prettify output like the following (jq even more colorful):

{
  "foo": "lorem",
  "bar": "ipsum"
}

The huge advantage of jq is that it can do A LOT more if you'd like to parse and process the json.

Answer 5

On *nix, reading from stdin and writing to stdout works better:

#!/usr/bin/env python
"""
Convert JSON data to human-readable form.

(Reads from stdin and writes to stdout)
"""

import sys
try:
    import simplejson as json
except:
    import json

print json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), indent=4)
sys.exit(0)

Put this in a file (I named mine "prettyJSON" after AnC's answer) in your PATH and chmod +x it, and you're good to go.

Answer 6

You can use this simple command to achieve the result:

echo "{ \"foo\": \"lorem\", \"bar\": \"ipsum\" }"|python -m json.tool