Is there a (Unix) shell script to format JSON in human-readable form?
Basically, I want it to transform the following:
{ "foo": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum" } ... into something like this:
{ "foo": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum" } 60 Answers
With Python 2.6+ you can do:
echo '{"foo": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum"}' | python -m json.tool or, if the JSON is in a file, you can do:
python -m json.tool my_json.json if the JSON is from an internet source such as an API, you can use
curl | python -m json.tool For convenience in all of these cases you can make an alias:
alias prettyjson='python -m json.tool' For even more convenience with a bit more typing to get it ready:
prettyjson_s() { echo "$1" | python -m json.tool } prettyjson_f() { python -m json.tool "$1" } prettyjson_w() { curl "$1" | python -m json.tool } for all the above cases. You can put this in .bashrc and it will be available every time in shell. Invoke it like prettyjson_s '{"foo": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum"}'.
Note that as @pnd pointed out in the comments below, in Python 3.5+ the JSON object is no longer sorted by default. To sort, add the --sort-keys flag to the end. I.e. ... | python -m json.tool --sort-keys.
You can use: jq
It's very simple to use and it works great! It can handle very large JSON structures, including streams. You can find their tutorials here.
Usage examples:
$ jq --color-output . file1.json file1.json | less -R $ command_with_json_output | jq . $ jq # stdin/"interactive" mode, just enter some JSON $ jq <<< '{ "foo": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum" }' { "bar": "ipsum", "foo": "lorem" } Or use jq with identity filter:
$ jq '.foo' <<< '{ "foo": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum" }' "lorem" I use the "space" argument of JSON.stringify to pretty-print JSON in JavaScript.
Examples:
// Indent with 4 spaces JSON.stringify({"foo":"lorem","bar":"ipsum"}, null, 4); // Indent with tabs JSON.stringify({"foo":"lorem","bar":"ipsum"}, null, '\t'); From the Unix command-line with Node.js, specifying JSON on the command line:
$ node -e "console.log(JSON.stringify(JSON.parse(process.argv[1]), null, '\t'));" \ '{"foo":"lorem","bar":"ipsum"}' Returns:
{ "foo": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum" } From the Unix command-line with Node.js, specifying a filename that contains JSON, and using an indent of four spaces:
$ node -e "console.log(JSON.stringify(JSON.parse(require('fs') \ .readFileSync(process.argv[1])), null, 4));" filename.json Using a pipe:
echo '{"foo": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum"}' | node -e \ "\ s=process.openStdin();\ d=[];\ s.on('data',function(c){\ d.push(c);\ });\ s.on('end',function(){\ console.log(JSON.stringify(JSON.parse(d.join('')),null,2));\ });\ " I wrote a tool that has one of the best "smart whitespace" formatters available. It produces more readable and less verbose output than most of the other options here.
This is what "smart whitespace" looks like:
I may be a bit biased, but it's an awesome tool for printing and manipulating JSON data from the command-line. It's super-friendly to use and has extensive command-line help/documentation. It's a Swiss Army knife that I use for 1001 different small tasks that would be surprisingly annoying to do any other way.
Latest use-case: Chrome, Dev console, Network tab, export all as HAR file, "cat site.har | underscore select '.url' --outfmt text | grep mydomain"; now I have a chronologically ordered list of all URL fetches made during the loading of my company's site.
Pretty printing is easy:
underscore -i data.json print Same thing:
cat data.json | underscore print Same thing, more explicit:
cat data.json | underscore print --outfmt pretty This tool is my current passion project, so if you have any feature requests, there is a good chance I'll address them.
6I 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" | python -mjson.tool If you use npm and Node.js, you can do npm install -g json and then pipe the command through json. Do json -h to get all the options. It can also pull out specific fields and colorize the output with -i.
curl -s | json Thanks to J.F. Sebastian's very helpful pointers, here's a slightly enhanced script I've come up with:
#!/usr/bin/python """ Convert JSON data to human-readable form. Usage: prettyJSON.py inputFile [outputFile] """ import sys import simplejson as json def main(args): try: if args[1] == '-': inputFile = sys.stdin else: inputFile = open(args[1]) input = json.load(inputFile) inputFile.close() except IndexError: usage() return False if len(args) < 3: print json.dumps(input, sort_keys = False, indent = 4) else: outputFile = open(args[2], "w") json.dump(input, outputFile, sort_keys = False, indent = 4) outputFile.close() return True def usage(): print __doc__ if __name__ == "__main__": sys.exit(not main(sys.argv)) It is not too simple with a native way with the jq tools.
For example:
cat xxx | jq . 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").
a simple bash script for pretty json printing
json_pretty.sh
#/bin/bash grep -Eo '"[^"]*" *(: *([0-9]*|"[^"]*")[^{}\["]*|,)?|[^"\]\[\}\{]*|\{|\},?|\[|\],?|[0-9 ]*,?' | awk '{if ($0 ~ /^[}\]]/ ) offset-=4; printf "%*c%s\n", offset, " ", $0; if ($0 ~ /^[{\[]/) offset+=4}' Example:
cat file.json | json_pretty.sh 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.
The JSON Ruby Gem is bundled with a shell script to prettify JSON:
sudo gem install json echo '{ "foo": "bar" }' | prettify_json.rb That's how I do it:
curl yourUri | json_pp It shortens the code and gets the job done.
2$ echo '{ "foo": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum" }' \ > | python -c'import fileinput, json; > print(json.dumps(json.loads("".join(fileinput.input())), > sort_keys=True, indent=4))' { "bar": "ipsum", "foo": "lorem" } NOTE: It is not the way to do it.
The same in Perl:
$ cat json.txt \ > | perl -0007 -MJSON -nE'say to_json(from_json($_, {allow_nonref=>1}), > {pretty=>1})' { "bar" : "ipsum", "foo" : "lorem" } Note 2: If you run
echo '{ "Düsseldorf": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum" }' \ | python -c'import fileinput, json; print(json.dumps(json.loads("".join(fileinput.input())), sort_keys=True, indent=4))' the nicely readable word becomes \u encoded
{ "D\u00fcsseldorf": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum" } If the remainder of your pipeline will gracefully handle unicode and you'd like your JSON to also be human-friendly, simply use ensure_ascii=False
echo '{ "Düsseldorf": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum" }' \ | python -c'import fileinput, json; print json.dumps(json.loads("".join(fileinput.input())), sort_keys=True, indent=4, ensure_ascii=False)' and you'll get:
{ "Düsseldorf": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum" } UPDATE I'm using jq now as suggested in another answer. It's extremely powerful at filtering JSON, but, at its most basic, also an awesome way to pretty print JSON for viewing.
jsonpp is a very nice command line JSON pretty printer.
From the README:
Pretty print web service responses like so:
curl -s -L | jsonppand make beautiful the files running around on your disk:
jsonpp data/long_malformed.json
If you're on Mac OS X, you can brew install jsonpp. If not, you can simply copy the binary to somewhere in your $PATH.
Try pjson. It has colors!
Install it with pip:
⚡ pip install pjson
And then pipe any JSON content to pjson.
You can use this simple command to achieve the result:
echo "{ \"foo\": \"lorem\", \"bar\": \"ipsum\" }"|python -m json.tool Or, with Ruby:
echo '{ "foo": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum" }' | ruby -r json -e 'jj JSON.parse gets' I use jshon to do exactly what you're describing. Just run:
echo $COMPACTED_JSON_TEXT | jshon You can also pass arguments to transform the JSON data.
3Check out Jazor. It's a simple command line JSON parser written in Ruby.
gem install jazor jazor --help JSONLint has an open-source implementation on GitHub that can be used on the command line or included in a Node.js project.
npm install jsonlint -g and then
jsonlint -p myfile.json or
curl -s "" | jsonlint | less Simply pipe the output to jq ..
Example:
twurl -H ads-api.twitter.com '.......' | jq . You can simply use standard tools like jq or json_pp.
echo '{ "foo": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum" }' | json_pp
or
echo '{ "foo": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum" }' | jq
will both prettify output like the following (jq even more colorful):
{ "foo": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum" } The huge advantage of jq is that it can do A LOT more if you'd like to parse and process the json.
2With Perl, if you install JSON::PP from CPAN you'll get the json_pp command. Stealing the example from B Bycroft you get:
[pdurbin@beamish ~]$ 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
Pygmentize
I combine Python's json.tool with pygmentize:
echo '{"foo": "bar"}' | python -m json.tool | pygmentize -g There are some alternatives to pygmentize which are listed in my this answer.
Here is a live demo:
I recommend using the json_xs command line utility which is included in the JSON::XS perl module. JSON::XS is a Perl module for serializing/deserializing JSON, on a Debian or Ubuntu machine you can install it like this:
sudo apt-get install libjson-xs-perl It is obviously also available on CPAN.
To use it to format JSON obtained from a URL you can use curl or wget like this:
$ curl -s | json_xs or this:
$ wget -q -O - | json_xs and to format JSON contained in a file you can do this:
$ json_xs < file-full-of.json To reformat as YAML, which some people consider to be more humanly-readable than JSON:
$ json_xs -t yaml < file-full-of.json jj is super-fast, can handle ginormous JSON documents economically, does not mess with valid JSON numbers, and is easy to use, e.g.
jj -p # for reading from STDIN or
jj -p -i input.json It is (2018) still quite new so maybe it won’t handle invalid JSON the way you expect, but it is easy to install on major platforms.
bat is a cat clone with syntax highlighting:
Example:
echo '{"bignum":1e1000}' | bat -p -l json -p will output without headers, and -l will explicitly specify the language.
It has colouring and formatting for JSON and does not have the problems noted in this comment: How can I pretty-print JSON in a shell script?
brew install jqcommand + | jq- (example:
curl localhost:5000/blocks | jq) - Enjoy!
Install yajl-tools with the command below:
sudo apt-get install yajl-tools then,
echo '{"foo": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum"}' | json_reformat 
