How to fix JSON indentation in vim?

Question

In vim, the default indentation for JSON is:

{
    \"employees\": [
    { \"firstName\":\"John\" , \"lastName\":\"Doe\" }, 
    { \"firstName\":\"Anna\" , \"         


        

Answer 1

Here's an example in Ruby:

:%! ruby -rjson -e "print JSON.pretty_generate(JSON.parse(ARGF.read))"

(https://gist.github.com/zinovyev/c4b6ec3c24670278adfebfb9ecced84b)

Answer 2

gg=G is what you need if you are using vim.

Answer 3

If you have jq (source) available, you can use in the command mode:

:%!jq .

Answer 4

You can send to an external tool, as an example, if you have python you can send the content to python's json tool using:

:%!python -m json.tool

Answer 5

python -m json.tool reorders the position of the JSON object properties, if you have node installed, you can just use this function:

function FormatJSON(...) 
  let code="\"
        \ var i = process.stdin, d = '';
        \ i.resume();
        \ i.setEncoding('utf8');
        \ i.on('data', function(data) { d += data; });
        \ i.on('end', function() {
        \     console.log(JSON.stringify(JSON.parse(d), null, 
        \ " . (a:0 ? a:1 ? a:1 : 2 : 2) . "));
        \ });\""
  execute "%! node -e " . code 
endfunction

Mapped to f-j in .vimrc

nmap fj :<C-U>call FormatJSON(v:count)<CR>

You can also pass a number of spaces for a tab, 2 are the default if you don't specify any.

4fj

My complete .vimrc is here https://github.com/botverse/.dotfiles/blob/master/.vimrc

Answer 6

romainl recommendation is the preferred way, but sometimes you need to pretty indent JSON text inside some buffer that doesn't have the json filetype. I use this nice command:

command! -range -nargs=0 -bar JsonTool <line1>,<line2>!python -m json.tool

Just run :JsonTool and it will pretty print the current line. It can take a range as well:

:JsonTool
:'<,'>JsonTool
:10,25JsonTool

If you do not have python or prefer a pure vim solution you may be interested in Tim Pope's jdaddy plugin. Jdaddy provides JSON text objects: aj and ij as well as print print JSON formatting, e.g. gqaj.