The Best Way To Pretty Print JSON On The Command-Line

Developers tend to work with APIs a lot and these days most of these APIs are JSON. These JSON strings aren’t exactly easy to read unless they are formatted well. There are many services online that can pretty print JSON for you, but that’s annoying. I love the command-line and whenever I am playing with new APIs or writing my own I mostly use CURL which means I need a good way to pretty print my JSON on the command-line. It should be simple, quick, easy to remember, easy to install – we’re not trying to solve complex algorithms, just format some JSON.

The ‘Good’ Old Faithful

One way that is always available is the Python JSON tool. So you can always do this:

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echo '{"b":2, "a":1}' | python -mjson.tool

Which will give you:

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{
    "a": 1,
    "b": 2
}

This is alright and, as I said, it is always available. However note that it has sorted our keys which is a major disadvantage. It is also a bit of a handful to write when you just want to pretty print some JSON. I only ever use this when I am on an unfamiliar computer and there is nothing better.

YAJL Tools

If you’re not using YAJL you should be. It is a small JSON library written in C. The parser is event driven and super fast. In the Ruby world we have a nice set of bindings and there are bindings for other languages as well. It is my go-to JSON library.

YAJL also cames with a couple of tools, json_reformat and json_verify. These are pretty self-explanatory and you can get your hands on them like this:

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brew install yajl

or

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sudo apt-get install yajl-tools

After that all you have to do is:

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echo '{"b":2, "a":1}' | json_reformat

Which will give you:

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{
    "b": 2,
    "a": 1
}

This is pretty nice. My one tiny niggle is that json_reformat is still a bit of a mouthful, but if you just want basic JSON formatting, it’s a good solution.

Ppjson

Of course being developers, we don’t have to put up with even minor niggles since we can build ourselves exactly the tools we need (and a little bit extra to boot). I was writing a command-line framework and I just happened to need a command-line tool, which is how I ended up with ppjson. I use Ruby quite a bit, so it is a Ruby tool and even if I do say so myself, it’s pretty nice.

You just need to:

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gem install ppjson

This will let you do:

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echo '{"b":2, "a":1}' | ppjson

Which will give you:

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{
  "b": 2,
  "a": 1
}

It uses YAJL through multi_json under the hood, so you still get the speed of YAJL, but it can also do a few extra things for you.

You can pass or pipe it some JSON and it will pretty print it to standard output for you. But you can also pass it a file name with some JSON in it and it will pretty print the contents of the file for you:

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ppjson -f abc123.json

You can also store the pretty printed contents back into the file:

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ppjson -fi abc123.json

Sometimes you have saved some pretty printed JSON in a file, but now you want to use it as a body of a CURL POST request, for example. Well ppjson can uglify your JSON for you as well:

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ppjson -fu abc123.json

This will output a minified JSON string to standard output. And of course you can also update the original file with the uglified JSON as well:

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ppjson -fui abc123.json

It will do you basic JSON pretty printing with an easy to remember executable name, but it also has a few nice convenience features to make your life that little bit easier.

The best part is that using Escort](https://github.com/skorks/escort), it was a breeze to write. I’ll [talk about some of the other interesting projects that ‘fell out’ of Escort some other time.

Anyway, now you no longer need to remember that IDE or editor shortcut to format your JSON or look for an online tool to do the same, the command-line has you more than covered.

Image by NS Newsflash