Is there a (Unix) shell script to format JSON in human-readable form?
Basically, I want it to transform the following:
{ "foo": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum" }
... into something like this:
{ "foo": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum" }
Is there a (Unix) shell script to format JSON in human-readable form?
Basically, I want it to transform the following:
{ "foo": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum" }
... into something like this:
{ "foo": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum" }
With Python 2.6+ you can just do:
echo '{"foo": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum"}' | python -m json.tool
or, if the JSON is in a file, you can do:
python -m json.tool my_json.json
if the JSON is from an internet source such as an API, you can use
curl http://my_url/ | python -m json.tool
For convenience in all of these cases you can make an alias:
alias prettyjson='python -m json.tool'
For even more convenience with a bit more typing to get it ready:
prettyjson_s() { echo "$1" | python -m json.tool } prettyjson_f() { python -m json.tool "$1" } prettyjson_w() { curl "$1" | python -m json.tool }
for all the above cases. You can put this in .bashrc
and it will be available every time in shell. Invoke it like prettyjson_s '{"foo": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum"}'
.
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.
Here is an example:
$ jq .
Or in other words:
$ echo '{ "foo": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum" }' | jq . { "bar": "ipsum", "foo": "lorem" }
I use the "space" argument of [JSON.stringify
]1 to pretty-print JSON in JavaScript.
Examples:
// Indent with 4 spaces JSON.stringify({"foo":"lorem","bar":"ipsum"}, null, 4); // Indent with tabs JSON.stringify({"foo":"lorem","bar":"ipsum"}, null, '\t');
From the Unix command-line with nodejs, specifying json on the command line:
$ node -e "console.log(JSON.stringify(JSON.parse(process.argv[1]), null, '\t'));" \ '{"foo":"lorem","bar":"ipsum"}'
Returns:
{ "foo": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum" }
From the Unix command-line with Node.js, specifying a filename that contains JSON, and using an indent of four spaces:
$ node -e "console.log(JSON.stringify(JSON.parse(require('fs') \ .readFileSync(process.argv[1])), null, 4));" filename.json
Using a pipe:
echo '{"foo": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum"}' | node -e \ "\ s=process.openStdin();\ d=[];\ s.on('data',function(c){\ d.push(c);\ });\ s.on('end',function(){\ console.log(JSON.stringify(JSON.parse(d.join('')),null,2));\ });\ "
I wrote a tool that has one of the best "smart whitespace" formatters available. It produces more readable and less verbose output than most of the other options here.
This is what "smart whitespace" looks like:
I may be a bit biased, but it's an awesome tool for printing and manipulating JSON data from the command-line. It's super-friendly to use and has extensive command-line help/documentation. It's a Swiss Army knife that I use for 1001 different small tasks that would be surprisingly annoying to do any other way.
Latest use-case: Chrome, Dev console, Network tab, export all as HAR file, "cat site.har | underscore select '.url' --outfmt text | grep mydomain"; now I have a chronologically ordered list of all URL fetches made during the loading of my company's site.
Pretty printing is easy:
underscore -i data.json print
Same thing:
cat data.json | underscore print
Same thing, more explicit:
cat data.json | underscore print --outfmt pretty
This tool is my current passion project, so if you have any feature requests, there is a good chance I'll address them.
I usually just do:
echo '{"test":1,"test2":2}' | python -mjson.tool
And to retrieve select data (in this case, "test"'s value):
echo '{"test":1,"test2":2}' | python -c 'import sys,json;data=json.loads(sys.stdin.read()); print data["test"]'
If the JSON data is in a file:
python -mjson.tool filename.json
If you want to do it all in one go with curl
on the command line using an authentication token:
curl -X GET -H "Authorization: Token wef4fwef54te4t5teerdfgghrtgdg53" http://testsite/api/ | python -mjson.tool
Thanks to J.F. Sebastian's very helpful pointers, here's a slightly enhanced script I've come up with:
#!/usr/bin/python """ Convert JSON data to human-readable form. Usage: prettyJSON.py inputFile [outputFile] """ import sys import simplejson as json def main(args): try: if args[1] == '-': inputFile = sys.stdin else: inputFile = open(args[1]) input = json.load(inputFile) inputFile.close() except IndexError: usage() return False if len(args)
With Perl, use the CPAN module JSON::XS
. It installs a command line tool json_xs
.
Validate:
json_xs -t null
Prettify the JSON file src.json
to pretty.json
:
pretty.json
If you don't have json_xs
, try json_pp
. "pp" is for "pure perl" – the tool is implemented in Perl only, without a binding to an external C library (which is what XS stands for, Perl's "Extension System").
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.
The JSON Ruby Gem is bundled with a shell script to prettify JSON:
sudo gem install json echo '{ "foo": "bar" }' | prettify_json.rb
Script download: gist.github.com/3738968
If you use npm and Node.js, you can do npm install -g json
and then pipe the command through json
. Do json -h
to get all the options. It can also pull out specific fields and colorize the output with -i
.
curl -s http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=node.js | json
UPDATE I'm using jq
now as suggested in another answer. It's extremely powerful at filtering JSON, but, at its most basic, also an awesome way to pretty print JSON for viewing.
jsonpp is a very nice command line JSON pretty printer.
From the README:
Pretty print web service responses like so:
curl -s -L http://t.co/tYTq5Pu | jsonpp
and make beautiful the files running around on your disk:
jsonpp data/long_malformed.json
If you're on Mac OS X, you can brew install jsonpp
. If not, you can simply copy the binary to somewhere in your $PATH
.
I use jshon to do exactly what you're describing. Just run:
echo $COMPACTED_JSON_TEXT | jshon
You can also pass arguments to transform the JSON data.
Check out Jazor. It's a simple command line JSON parser written in Ruby.
gem install jazor jazor --help
$ 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" }
Or, with Ruby:
echo '{ "foo": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum" }' | ruby -r json -e 'jj JSON.parse gets'
Simply pipe the output to jq .
.
Example:
twurl -H ads-api.twitter.com '.......' | jq .
JSONLint has an open-source implementation on github 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
That's how I do it:
curl yourUri | json_pp
It shortens the code and gets the job done.
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:
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
To reformat as YAML, which some people consider to be more humanly-readable than JSON:
$ json_xs -t yaml
With Perl, if you install JSON::PP from CPAN you'll get the json_pp command. Stealing the example from B Bycroft you get:
[pdurbin@beamish ~]$ echo '{"foo": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum"}' | json_pp { "bar" : "ipsum", "foo" : "lorem" }
It's worth mentioning that json_pp
comes pre-installed with Ubuntu 12.04 (at least) and Debian in /usr/bin/json_pp
Install yajl-tools with the command below:
sudo apt-get install yajl-tools
then,
echo '{"foo": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum"}' | json_reformat
yajl
is very nice, in my experience. I use its json_reformat
command to pretty-print .json
files in vim
by putting the following line in my .vimrc
:
autocmd FileType json setlocal equalprg=json_reformat
I'm using httpie
$ pip install httpie
And you can use it like this
$ http PUT localhost:8001/api/v1/ports/my HTTP/1.1 200 OK Connection: keep-alive Content-Length: 93 Content-Type: application/json Date: Fri, 06 Mar 2015 02:46:41 GMT Server: nginx/1.4.6 (Ubuntu) X-Powered-By: HHVM/3.5.1 { "data": [], "message": "Failed to manage ports in 'my'. Request body is empty", "success": false }
The PHP version, if you have PHP >= 5.4.
alias prettify_json=php -E '$o = json_decode($argn); print json_encode($o, JSON_PRETTY_PRINT);' echo '{"a":1,"b":2}' | prettify_json
I know this question has been replied ad nauseam, but I wanted to document a Ruby solution that is better than Json's prettify command, the gem colorful_json
is fairly good.
gem install colorful_json echo '{"foo": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum"}' | cjson { "foo": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum" }
Use Ruby in one line:
echo '{"test":1,"test2":2}' | ruby -e "require 'json'; puts JSON.pretty_generate(JSON.parse(STDIN.read))"
And you can set an alias for this:
alias to_j="ruby -e \"require 'json';puts JSON.pretty_generate(JSON.parse(STDIN.read))\""
Then you can use it more conveniently
echo '{"test":1,"test2":2}' | to_j { "test": 1, "test2": 2 }
And if you want display JSON with color, your can install awesome_print
,
gem install awesome_print
then
alias to_j="ruby -e \"require 'json';require 'awesome_print';ap JSON.parse(STDIN.read)\""
Try it!
echo '{"test":1,"test2":2, "arr":["aa","bb","cc"] }' | to_j