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

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