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

With Perl, use the CPAN module JSON::XS. It installs a command line tool json_xs.

Validate:

json_xs -t null < myfile.json

Prettify the JSON file src.json to pretty.json:

< src.json json_xs > 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").