How can I pretty-print JSON using Go?

Question

Does anyone know of a simple way to pretty-print JSON output in Go?

The stock http://golang.org/pkg/encoding/json/ package does not seem to include functiona

Answer 1

I was frustrated by the lack of a fast, high quality way to marshal JSON to a colorized string in Go so I wrote my own Marshaller called ColorJSON.

With it, you can easily produce output like this using very little code:

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "encoding/json"

    "github.com/TylerBrock/colorjson"
)

func main() {
    str := `{
      "str": "foo",
      "num": 100,
      "bool": false,
      "null": null,
      "array": ["foo", "bar", "baz"],
      "obj": { "a": 1, "b": 2 }
    }`

    var obj map[string]interface{}
    json.Unmarshal([]byte(str), &obj)

    // Make a custom formatter with indent set
    f := colorjson.NewFormatter()
    f.Indent = 4

    // Marshall the Colorized JSON
    s, _ := f.Marshal(obj)
    fmt.Println(string(s))
}

I'm writing the documentation for it now but I was excited to share my solution.