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

That's how I do it:

curl yourUri | json_pp

It shortens the code and gets the job done.

Answer 2

bat is a cat clone with syntax highlighting:

Example:

echo '{"bignum":1e1000}' | bat -p -l json

-p will output without headers, and -l will explicitly specify the language.

It has colouring and formatting for JSON and does not have the problems noted in this comment: How can I pretty-print JSON in a shell script?

Answer 3

Install yajl-tools with the command below:

sudo apt-get install yajl-tools

then,

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

Answer 4

JSONLint has an open-source implementation on GitHub that can be used on the command line or included in a Node.js project.

npm install jsonlint -g

and then

jsonlint -p myfile.json

or

curl -s "http://api.twitter.com/1/users/show/user.json" | jsonlint | less

Answer 5

I recommend using the json_xs command line utility which is included in the JSON::XS perl module. JSON::XS is a Perl module for serializing/deserializing JSON, on a Debian or Ubuntu machine you can install it like this:

sudo apt-get install libjson-xs-perl

It is obviously also available on CPAN.

To use it to format JSON obtained from a URL you can use curl or wget like this:

$ curl -s http://page.that.serves.json.com/json/ | json_xs

or this:

$ wget -q -O - http://page.that.serves.json.com/json/ | json_xs

and to format JSON contained in a file you can do this:

$ json_xs < file-full-of.json

To reformat as YAML, which some people consider to be more humanly-readable than JSON:

$ json_xs -t yaml < file-full-of.json

Answer 6

You can use: jq

It's very simple to use and it works great! It can handle very large JSON structures, including streams. You can find their tutorials here.

Usage examples:

$ jq --color-output file1.json file1.json | less -R

$ command_with_json_output | jq .

$ jq # stdin/"interactive" mode, just enter some JSON

$ jq <<< '{ "foo": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum" }'
{
  "bar": "ipsum",
  "foo": "lorem"
}

Or use jq with identity filter:

$ jq '.foo' <<< '{ "foo": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum" }'
"lorem"