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

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.