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    ipsum          into something like this          foo    lorem        bar    ipsum

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Here is how to do it with Groovy script   Create a Groovy script  let s say  pretty-print      usr bin env groovy  import groovy json JsonOutput  System in withReader   println JsonOutput prettyPrint it readLine        Make script executable   chmod  x pretty-print   Now from the command line   echo    foo    lorem    bar    ipsum        pretty-print

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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

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With Python 2 6  you can do   echo    quot foo quot    quot lorem quot    quot bar quot    quot ipsum quot      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 http   my url    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  quot  1 quot    python -m json tool    prettyjson f         python -m json tool  quot  1 quot     prettyjson w         curl  quot  1 quot    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    quot foo quot    quot lorem quot    quot bar quot    quot ipsum quot     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

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There is TidyJSON   It s C   so maybe you can get it to compile with Mono  and working on  nix  No guarantees though  sorry

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There is TidyJSON   It s C   so maybe you can get it to compile with Mono  and working on  nix  No guarantees though  sorry

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I ve came up with this solution  https   calbertts medium com unix-pipelines-with-curl-requests-and-serverless-functions-e21117ae4c65   this in your bash profile jsonprettify       curl -Ss -X POST -H  quot Content-Type  text plain quot  --data-binary  - https   jsonprettify vercel app api server indent       echo    quot prop quot   true   quot key quot    1 2      jsonprettify 4            quot prop quot   true         quot key quot               1            2              There s no need to install anything  if you have an internet connection and cURL installed  you can use this function  Are you in another host where you can t install anything  this would be a perfect solution to that issue

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If you have Node js installed you can create one on your own with one line of code  Create a file pretty    gt  vim pretty     usr bin env node  console log JSON stringify JSON parse process argv 2    null  2     Add execute permission    gt  chmod  x pretty  gt    pretty    quot foo quot    quot lorem quot    quot bar quot    quot ipsum quot     Or if your JSON is in a file     usr bin env node  console log JSON stringify require  quot    quot    process argv 2    null  2       gt    pretty file json

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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

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brew install jq command     jq   example  curl localhost 5000 blocks   jq  Enjoy

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gem install jsonpretty echo    foo    lorem    bar    ipsum      jsonpretty   This method also  Detects HTTP response headers  prints them untouched  and skips to   the body  for use with  curl -i

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That s how I do it   curl yourUri   json pp   It shortens the code and gets the job done

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TL DR  for performances  use jj -p  lt  my json   Benchmark  I took some solutions here and benchmarked them with the next dummy script   function bench       time         for i in  1  100   do         echo     foo    lorem    bar    ipsum            gt   dev null       done           Here s the result on my mac  8 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3  2 3 GHz Intel Core i5    bench python -m json tool   3 60s user 1 24s system 88  cpu 5 448 total bench jq   2 79s user 0 29s system 89  cpu 3 453 total bench bat -p -l json   5 77s user 0 99s system 95  cpu 7 080 total bench jj -p   0 19s user 0 26s system 85  cpu 0 529 total   Thanks  peak and your answer for this discovery of jj

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For Node js you can also use the  util  module  It uses syntax-highlighting  smart indentation  removes quotes from keys and just makes the output as pretty as it gets   cat file json   node -e  process stdin pipe new require  stream   Writable  write  chunk   gt    console log require  util   inspect JSON parse chunk    depth  null  colors  true

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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

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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

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echo     foo    lorem    bar    ipsum        gt    python -c import fileinput  json   gt  print json dumps json loads    join fileinput input       gt                   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    gt    perl -0007 -MJSON -nE say to json from json      allow nonref  gt 1      gt                                       pretty  gt 1          bar     ipsum       foo     lorem      Note 2  If you run  echo     D  sseldorf    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     D  sseldorf    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          D  sseldorf    lorem         bar    ipsum

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I 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  http   testsite api    python -mjson tool

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Here is how to do it with Groovy script   Create a Groovy script  let s say  pretty-print      usr bin env groovy  import groovy json JsonOutput  System in withReader   println JsonOutput prettyPrint it readLine        Make script executable   chmod  x pretty-print   Now from the command line   echo    foo    lorem    bar    ipsum        pretty-print

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Check out Jazor  It s a simple command line JSON parser written in Ruby   gem install jazor jazor --help

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I m the author of json-liner  It s a command line tool to turn JSON into a grep friendly format  Give it a try     echo    a   1   b   2     json-liner   a 1   b 2   echo    foo    bar    baz      json-liner   0 foo   1 bar   2 baz

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A one-line solution using Node js will look like this     node -e  console log  JSON stringify  JSON parse require  fs   readFileSync 0     0  1       For example     cat test json   node -e  console log  JSON stringify  JSON parse require  fs   readFileSync 0     0  1

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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  http   api twitter com 1 users show user json    jsonlint   less

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https   github com aidanmelen json pretty print  from   future   import unicode literals from   future   import absolute import from   future   import print function from   future   import division  import json import jsonschema  def  validate data       schema      schema    http   json-schema org draft-04 schema        try          jsonschema validate data  schema                              format checker jsonschema FormatChecker        except jsonschema exceptions ValidationError as ve          sys stderr write  Whoops  the data you provided does not seem to be              valid JSON  n    format ve    def pprint data  python obj False    kwargs        validate data      kwargs  indent     kwargs get  indent   4      pretty data   json dumps data    kwargs      if python obj          print pretty data      else         repls      u                                                      None   null                      True   true                      False   false        print reduce lambda a  kv  a replace  kv   repls  pretty data

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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

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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

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My JSON files were not parsed by any of these methods   My problem was similar to the post Is Google data source JSON not valid    The answer to that post helped me find a solution   It is considered to be invalid JSON without the string keys    id  name  label  Name  type  string     must be     id    name    label    Name    type    string     This link gives a nice comprehensive comparison of some of the different JSON parsers  http   deron meranda us python comparing json modules basic  Which led me to http   deron meranda us python demjson   I think this one parser is much more fault tolerant than many others

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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

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There is TidyJSON   It s C   so maybe you can get it to compile with Mono  and working on  nix  No guarantees though  sorry

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I ve came up with this solution  https   calbertts medium com unix-pipelines-with-curl-requests-and-serverless-functions-e21117ae4c65   this in your bash profile jsonprettify       curl -Ss -X POST -H  quot Content-Type  text plain quot  --data-binary  - https   jsonprettify vercel app api server indent       echo    quot prop quot   true   quot key quot    1 2      jsonprettify 4            quot prop quot   true         quot key quot               1            2              There s no need to install anything  if you have an internet connection and cURL installed  you can use this function  Are you in another host where you can t install anything  this would be a perfect solution to that issue

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Here is a Groovy one-liner   echo    foo    lorem    bar    ipsum      groovy -e  import groovy json    println JsonOutput prettyPrint System in text

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There is TidyJSON   It s C   so maybe you can get it to compile with Mono  and working on  nix  No guarantees though  sorry

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Check out Jazor  It s a simple command line JSON parser written in Ruby   gem install jazor jazor --help

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With JavaScript Node js  take a look at the vkBeautify js plugin  which provides pretty printing for both JSON and XML text   It s written in plain JavaScript  less than 1 5 nbsp KB  minified  and very fast

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With Perl  use the CPAN module JSON  XS  It installs a command line tool json xs   Validate   json xs -t null  lt  myfile json   Prettify the JSON file src json to pretty json    lt  src json json xs  gt  pretty json   If you don t have json xs  try json pp    pp  is for  pure perl   ndash  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

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You can use this simple command to achieve the result   echo      foo      lorem      bar      ipsum      python -m json tool

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I m using httpie    pip install httpie   And you can use it like this     http PUT localhost 8001 api v1 ports my   HTTP 1 1 200 OK  Connection  keep-alive  Content-Length  93  Content-Type  application json  Date  Fri  06 Mar 2015 02 46 41 GMT  Server  nginx 1 4 6  Ubuntu   X-Powered-By  HHVM 3 5 1           data              message    Failed to manage ports in  my   Request body is empty          success   false

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You can use Xidel       Xidel is a command line tool to download and extract data from HTML XML pages or JSON-APIs  using CSS  XPath 3 0  XQuery 3 0  JSONiq or pattern templates  It can also create new or transformed XML HTML JSON documents    Xidel pretty-prints by default     xidel -s - -e   json   lt  lt  lt     foo   lorem   bar   ipsum         foo    lorem      bar    ipsum      or     echo    foo   lorem   bar   ipsum      xidel -s - -e        foo    lorem      bar    ipsum

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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 http   search twitter com search json q node js   json

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If you don t mind using a third-party tool  you can simply curl to jsonprettyprint org  This is for the case where you can t install packages on the machine   curl -XPOST https   jsonprettyprint org api -d    user    1

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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   lt  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

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The PHP version  if you have PHP    5 4   alias prettify json php -E   o   json decode  argn   print json encode  o  JSON PRETTY PRINT    echo    a  1  b  2     prettify json

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brew install jq command     jq   example  curl localhost 5000 blocks   jq  Enjoy

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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

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Use Ruby in one line   echo    test  1  test2  2     ruby -e  require  json   puts JSON pretty generate JSON parse STDIN read      And you can set an alias for this   alias to j  ruby -e   require  json  puts JSON pretty generate JSON parse STDIN read        Then you can use it more conveniently  echo    test  1  test2  2     to j       test   1     test2   2     And if you want display JSON with color  your can install awesome print   gem install awesome print   then  alias to j  ruby -e   require  json  require  awesome print  ap JSON parse STDIN read       Try it   echo    test  1  test2  2   arr    aa   bb   cc        to j

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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   lt  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

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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

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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

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For Node js you can also use the  util  module  It uses syntax-highlighting  smart indentation  removes quotes from keys and just makes the output as pretty as it gets   cat file json   node -e  process stdin pipe new require  stream   Writable  write  chunk   gt    console log require  util   inspect JSON parse chunk    depth  null  colors  true

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echo     foo    lorem    bar    ipsum        gt    python -c import fileinput  json   gt  print json dumps json loads    join fileinput input       gt                   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    gt    perl -0007 -MJSON -nE say to json from json      allow nonref  gt 1      gt                                       pretty  gt 1          bar     ipsum       foo     lorem      Note 2  If you run  echo     D  sseldorf    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     D  sseldorf    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          D  sseldorf    lorem         bar    ipsum

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Try pjson  It has colors     Install it with pip     pip install pjson   And then pipe any JSON content to pjson

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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 http    lt  ---- gt t co tYTq5Pu   jsonpp       and 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

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Try pjson  It has colors     Install it with pip     pip install pjson   And then pipe any JSON content to pjson

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I know that the original post asked for a shell script  but there are so many useful and irrelevant answers that probably did not help the original author  Adding on to irrelevance     BTW I could not get any command line tools to work   If somebody want simple JSON JavaScript code  they could do   JSON stringfy JSON parse str   null  4    http   www geospaces org geoweb Wiki jsp page JSON 20Utilities 20Demos  Here is JavaScript code that not only pretties the JSON  but orders them by their attribute or by attribute and level   If input is     c   1   a     b1   2   a1  1     b   1     it either prints  groups all the objects together            b   1        c   1        a                a1   1             b1   2            OR  just orders by key        a            a1   1         b1   2       b   1    c   1

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J F  Sebastian s solutions didn t work for me in Ubuntu 8 04  Here is a modified Perl version that works with the older 1 X JSON library   perl -0007 -MJSON -ne  print objToJson jsonToObj      allow nonref  gt 1     pretty  gt 1      n

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Here is a Ruby solution that is better than Json s prettify command  The gem colorful json is fairly good   gem install colorful json echo    foo    lorem    bar    ipsum      cjson      foo    lorem      bar    ipsum

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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  http   api twitter com 1 users show user json    jsonlint   less

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I m the author of json-liner  It s a command line tool to turn JSON into a grep friendly format  Give it a try     echo    a   1   b   2     json-liner   a 1   b 2   echo    foo    bar    baz      json-liner   0 foo   1 bar   2 baz

User · Answer

You can use Xidel       Xidel is a command line tool to download and extract data from HTML XML pages or JSON-APIs  using CSS  XPath 3 0  XQuery 3 0  JSONiq or pattern templates  It can also create new or transformed XML HTML JSON documents    Xidel pretty-prints by default     xidel -s - -e   json   lt  lt  lt     foo   lorem   bar   ipsum         foo    lorem      bar    ipsum      or     echo    foo   lorem   bar   ipsum      xidel -s - -e        foo    lorem      bar    ipsum

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https   github com aidanmelen json pretty print  from   future   import unicode literals from   future   import absolute import from   future   import print function from   future   import division  import json import jsonschema  def  validate data       schema      schema    http   json-schema org draft-04 schema        try          jsonschema validate data  schema                              format checker jsonschema FormatChecker        except jsonschema exceptions ValidationError as ve          sys stderr write  Whoops  the data you provided does not seem to be              valid JSON  n    format ve    def pprint data  python obj False    kwargs        validate data      kwargs  indent     kwargs get  indent   4      pretty data   json dumps data    kwargs      if python obj          print pretty data      else         repls      u                                                      None   null                      True   true                      False   false        print reduce lambda a  kv  a replace  kv   repls  pretty data

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echo     foo    lorem    bar    ipsum        gt    python -c import fileinput  json   gt  print json dumps json loads    join fileinput input       gt                   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    gt    perl -0007 -MJSON -nE say to json from json      allow nonref  gt 1      gt                                       pretty  gt 1          bar     ipsum       foo     lorem      Note 2  If you run  echo     D  sseldorf    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     D  sseldorf    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          D  sseldorf    lorem         bar    ipsum

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I m using httpie    pip install httpie   And you can use it like this     http PUT localhost 8001 api v1 ports my   HTTP 1 1 200 OK  Connection  keep-alive  Content-Length  93  Content-Type  application json  Date  Fri  06 Mar 2015 02 46 41 GMT  Server  nginx 1 4 6  Ubuntu   X-Powered-By  HHVM 3 5 1           data              message    Failed to manage ports in  my   Request body is empty          success   false

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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   underscore-cli  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

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With Python 2 6  you can do   echo    quot foo quot    quot lorem quot    quot bar quot    quot ipsum quot      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 http   my url    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  quot  1 quot    python -m json tool    prettyjson f         python -m json tool  quot  1 quot     prettyjson w         curl  quot  1 quot    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    quot foo quot    quot lorem quot    quot bar quot    quot ipsum quot     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

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Also be sure to check out JSONFUI  A command line JSON viewer that supports folding

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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

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Use Ruby in one line   echo    test  1  test2  2     ruby -e  require  json   puts JSON pretty generate JSON parse STDIN read      And you can set an alias for this   alias to j  ruby -e   require  json  puts JSON pretty generate JSON parse STDIN read        Then you can use it more conveniently  echo    test  1  test2  2     to j       test   1     test2   2     And if you want display JSON with color  your can install awesome print   gem install awesome print   then  alias to j  ruby -e   require  json  require  awesome print  ap JSON parse STDIN read       Try it   echo    test  1  test2  2   arr    aa   bb   cc        to j

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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

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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  quot interactive quot  mode  just enter some JSON    jq  lt  lt  lt      quot foo quot    quot lorem quot    quot bar quot    quot ipsum quot          quot bar quot    quot ipsum quot      quot foo quot    quot lorem quot     Or use jq with identity filter    jq   foo   lt  lt  lt      quot foo quot    quot lorem quot    quot bar quot    quot ipsum quot      quot lorem quot

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Or  with Ruby   echo     foo    lorem    bar    ipsum       ruby -r json -e  jj JSON parse gets

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I know that the original post asked for a shell script  but there are so many useful and irrelevant answers that probably did not help the original author  Adding on to irrelevance     BTW I could not get any command line tools to work   If somebody want simple JSON JavaScript code  they could do   JSON stringfy JSON parse str   null  4    http   www geospaces org geoweb Wiki jsp page JSON 20Utilities 20Demos  Here is JavaScript code that not only pretties the JSON  but orders them by their attribute or by attribute and level   If input is     c   1   a     b1   2   a1  1     b   1     it either prints  groups all the objects together            b   1        c   1        a                a1   1             b1   2            OR  just orders by key        a            a1   1         b1   2       b   1    c   1

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TL DR  for performances  use jj -p  lt  my json   Benchmark  I took some solutions here and benchmarked them with the next dummy script   function bench       time         for i in  1  100   do         echo     foo    lorem    bar    ipsum            gt   dev null       done           Here s the result on my mac  8 GB 2133 MHz LPDDR3  2 3 GHz Intel Core i5    bench python -m json tool   3 60s user 1 24s system 88  cpu 5 448 total bench jq   2 79s user 0 29s system 89  cpu 3 453 total bench bat -p -l json   5 77s user 0 99s system 95  cpu 7 080 total bench jj -p   0 19s user 0 26s system 85  cpu 0 529 total   Thanks  peak and your answer for this discovery of jj

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yajl is very nice  in my experience  I use its json reformat command to pretty-print  json files in vim by putting the following line in my  vimrc   autocmd FileType json setlocal equalprg json reformat

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It is not too simple with a native way with the jq tools   For example    cat xxx   jq

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sudo apt-get install edit-json   prettify json myfile json

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Simply pipe the output to jq     Example   twurl -H ads-api twitter com             jq

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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 http    lt  ---- gt t co tYTq5Pu   jsonpp       and 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

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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 http   search twitter com search json q node js   json

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echo     foo    lorem    bar    ipsum        gt    python -c import fileinput  json   gt  print json dumps json loads    join fileinput input       gt                   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    gt    perl -0007 -MJSON -nE say to json from json      allow nonref  gt 1      gt                                       pretty  gt 1          bar     ipsum       foo     lorem      Note 2  If you run  echo     D  sseldorf    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     D  sseldorf    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          D  sseldorf    lorem         bar    ipsum

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Install yajl-tools with the command below  sudo apt-get install yajl-tools  then  echo    quot foo quot    quot lorem quot    quot bar quot    quot ipsum quot      json reformat

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yajl is very nice  in my experience  I use its json reformat command to pretty-print  json files in vim by putting the following line in my  vimrc   autocmd FileType json setlocal equalprg json reformat

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gem install jsonpretty echo    foo    lorem    bar    ipsum      jsonpretty   This method also  Detects HTTP response headers  prints them untouched  and skips to   the body  for use with  curl -i

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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  quot interactive quot  mode  just enter some JSON    jq  lt  lt  lt      quot foo quot    quot lorem quot    quot bar quot    quot ipsum quot          quot bar quot    quot ipsum quot      quot foo quot    quot lorem quot     Or use jq with identity filter    jq   foo   lt  lt  lt      quot foo quot    quot lorem quot    quot bar quot    quot ipsum quot      quot lorem quot

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You can also use online tools instead if that is an option for you   I find http   jsonprettyprint net to be the simplest and easiest

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It is not too simple with a native way with the jq tools   For example    cat xxx   jq

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You can use this simple command to achieve the result   echo      foo      lorem      bar      ipsum      python -m json tool

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Here is a Ruby solution that is better than Json s prettify command  The gem colorful json is fairly good   gem install colorful json echo    foo    lorem    bar    ipsum      cjson      foo    lorem      bar    ipsum

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The tool ydump is a JSON pretty-printer     ydump my data json      foo    lorem      bar    ipsum      Or you can pipe in the JSON     echo    foo    lorem    bar    ipsum      ydump      foo    lorem      bar    ipsum      This is probably the shortest solution apart from using the jq tool   This tool is part of the yojson library for OCaml  and is documented here   On Debian and derivatives  the package libyojson-ocaml-dev contains this tool  Alternatively  yojson can be installed via OPAM

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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 http   page that serves json com json    json xs   or this     wget -q -O - http   page that serves json com json    json xs   and to format JSON contained in a file you can do this     json xs  lt  file-full-of json   To reformat as YAML  which some people consider to be more humanly-readable than JSON     json xs -t yaml  lt  file-full-of json

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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

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If you don t mind using a third-party tool  you can simply curl to jsonprettyprint org  This is for the case where you can t install packages on the machine   curl -XPOST https   jsonprettyprint org api -d    user    1

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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

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Also be sure to check out JSONFUI  A command line JSON viewer that supports folding

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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   lt  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

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With JavaScript Node js  take a look at the vkBeautify js plugin  which provides pretty printing for both JSON and XML text   It s written in plain JavaScript  less than 1 5 nbsp KB  minified  and very fast

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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

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You can also use online tools instead if that is an option for you   I find http   jsonprettyprint net to be the simplest and easiest

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I 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  http   testsite api    python -mjson tool

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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 http   page that serves json com json    json xs   or this     wget -q -O - http   page that serves json com json    json xs   and to format JSON contained in a file you can do this     json xs  lt  file-full-of json   To reformat as YAML  which some people consider to be more humanly-readable than JSON     json xs -t yaml  lt  file-full-of json

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Or  with Ruby   echo     foo    lorem    bar    ipsum       ruby -r json -e  jj JSON parse gets

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Install yajl-tools with the command below  sudo apt-get install yajl-tools  then  echo    quot foo quot    quot lorem quot    quot bar quot    quot ipsum quot      json reformat

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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

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The tool ydump is a JSON pretty-printer     ydump my data json      foo    lorem      bar    ipsum      Or you can pipe in the JSON     echo    foo    lorem    bar    ipsum      ydump      foo    lorem      bar    ipsum      This is probably the shortest solution apart from using the jq tool   This tool is part of the yojson library for OCaml  and is documented here   On Debian and derivatives  the package libyojson-ocaml-dev contains this tool  Alternatively  yojson can be installed via OPAM

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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   underscore-cli  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

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My JSON files were not parsed by any of these methods   My problem was similar to the post Is Google data source JSON not valid    The answer to that post helped me find a solution   It is considered to be invalid JSON without the string keys    id  name  label  Name  type  string     must be     id    name    label    Name    type    string     This link gives a nice comprehensive comparison of some of the different JSON parsers  http   deron meranda us python comparing json modules basic  Which led me to http   deron meranda us python demjson   I think this one parser is much more fault tolerant than many others

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The JSON Ruby Gem is bundled with a shell script to prettify JSON   sudo gem install json echo     foo    bar       prettify json rb   Script download   gist github com 3738968

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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

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A one-line solution using Node js will look like this     node -e  console log  JSON stringify  JSON parse require  fs   readFileSync 0     0  1       For example     cat test json   node -e  console log  JSON stringify  JSON parse require  fs   readFileSync 0     0  1

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Simply pipe the output to jq     Example   twurl -H ads-api twitter com             jq

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sudo apt-get install edit-json   prettify json myfile json

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J F  Sebastian s solutions didn t work for me in Ubuntu 8 04  Here is a modified Perl version that works with the older 1 X JSON library   perl -0007 -MJSON -ne  print objToJson jsonToObj      allow nonref  gt 1     pretty  gt 1      n

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Here is a Groovy one-liner   echo    foo    lorem    bar    ipsum      groovy -e  import groovy json    println JsonOutput prettyPrint System in text

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The JSON Ruby Gem is bundled with a shell script to prettify JSON   sudo gem install json echo     foo    bar       prettify json rb   Script download   gist github com 3738968

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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

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That s how I do it   curl yourUri   json pp   It shortens the code and gets the job done

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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   lt  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

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If you have Node js installed you can create one on your own with one line of code  Create a file pretty    gt  vim pretty     usr bin env node  console log JSON stringify JSON parse process argv 2    null  2     Add execute permission    gt  chmod  x pretty  gt    pretty    quot foo quot    quot lorem quot    quot bar quot    quot ipsum quot     Or if your JSON is in a file     usr bin env node  console log JSON stringify require  quot    quot    process argv 2    null  2       gt    pretty file json

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The PHP version  if you have PHP    5 4   alias prettify json php -E   o   json decode  argn   print json encode  o  JSON PRETTY PRINT    echo    a  1  b  2     prettify json

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With Perl  use the CPAN module JSON  XS  It installs a command line tool json xs   Validate   json xs -t null  lt  myfile json   Prettify the JSON file src json to pretty json    lt  src json json xs  gt  pretty json   If you don t have json xs  try json pp    pp  is for  pure perl   ndash  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

[json] How can I pretty-print JSON in a shell script?

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