Pretty-Print JSON Data to a File using Python

Question

A project for class involves parsing Twitter JSON data  I m getting the data and setting it to the file without much trouble  but it s all in one line  This is fine for the data manipulation I m trying to do  but the file is ridiculously hard to read and I can t examine it very well  making the code writing for the data manipulation part very difficult    Does anyone know how to do that from within Python  i e  not using the command line tool  which I can t get to work   Here s my code so far   header  output   client request twitterRequest  method  GET   body None                              headers None  force auth header True     now write output to a file twitterDataFile   open  twitterData json    wb     magic happens here to make it pretty-printed twitterDataFile write output  twitterDataFile close     Note I appreciate people pointing me to simplejson documentation and such  but as I have stated  I have already looked at that and continue to need assistance  A truly helpful reply will be more detailed and explanatory than the examples found there  Thanks  Also  Trying this in the windows command line   more twitterData json   python -mjson tool  gt  twitterData-pretty json   results in this   Invalid control character at  line 1 column 65535  char 65535    I d give you the data I m using  but it s very large and you ve already seen the code I used to make the file

User · Accepted Answer

You should use the optional argument indent   header  output   client request twitterRequest  method  GET   body None                              headers None  force auth header True     now write output to a file twitterDataFile   open  twitterData json    w     magic happens here to make it pretty-printed twitterDataFile write simplejson dumps simplejson loads output   indent 4  sort keys True   twitterDataFile close

User · Answer

import json def writeToFile logData  fileName  openOption  w      file   open fileName  openOption    file write json dumps json loads logData   indent 4      file close

User · Answer

import json  with open  twitterdata json    w   as twitter data file      json dump output  twitter data file  indent 4  sort keys True    You don t need json dumps   if you don t want to parse the string later  just simply use json dump    It s faster too

User · Answer

You could redirect a file to python and open using the tool and to read it use more    The sample code will be   cat filename json   python -m json tool   more

User · Answer

If you already have existing JSON files which you want to pretty format you could use this       with open  twitterdata json    r    as f          data   json load f          f seek 0          json dump data  f  indent 4          f truncate

User · Answer

You can parse the JSON  then output it again with indents like this   import json mydata   json loads output  print json dumps mydata  indent 4    See http   docs python org library json html for more info

User · Answer

If you are generating new   json or modifying existing josn file the use  indent  parameter for pretty view json format   import json responseData   json loads output  with open  twitterData json   w   as twitterDataFile          json dump responseData  twitterDataFile  indent 4

User · Answer

You can use json module of python to pretty print    gt  gt  gt  import json  gt  gt  gt  print json dumps   4   5   6   7   sort keys True  indent 4         4   5       6   7     So  in your case    gt  gt  gt  print json dumps json output  indent 4

[python] Pretty-Print JSON Data to a File using Python

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