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, 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