jsonprettify

An utility to reformat JSON-documents with newlines and indention according to the document structure (or my personal taste if you like).

_ jsonprettify _ follows the convention by which the commas a are place before the next item instead of after the previous item. This makes it easier to spot missing commas and incorrect document structure in general.

If you are looking for conventional formatting consider prettify_json.rb supplied with the json ruby gem.

Command-line Application

For example: jsonprettify < package.json reformats the file package.json and prints it out to stout. For in-place formatting it is possible to use the -i and -o specifying the same file, e.g. jsonprettify -i package.json -o package.json.

Options

• --compact of -c will use the standard JSON.stringify command in node. This will result in a compact representation without newlines and spaces.

• if '-i' is not specified, stdin is used

• same as above with '-o' and stdout

There are more options. Invoke jsonprettify --help for the complete list of available options.

Library

An example in coffee-script would look like:

jsonprettify = require 'jsonprettify'

pretty_json = jsonprettify.json2prettyjson '{"someObject": {"somekey":"somevalue","boolkey":true},"someArray":["abc",3,1,2,true,false]}'

and if we output pretty_json we would get:

{ "someObject" : 
  { "somekey" : "somevalue"
  , "boolkey" : true
  } 
, "someArray" : 
  [ "abc"
  , 3
  , 1
  , 2
  , true
  , false
  ] 
} 

Options

json2prettyjson accepts an additional option argument, .e.g:

opts = 
  { "indent" : "  "
  , "sort" : true
  }

Note that the order has changed to be lexicographically sorted. However, depending on the input it might be necessary prettify several times to actually get the correct lexicographic order.

{ "someArray" : 
  [ 1
  , 2
  , 3
  , "abc"
  , false
  , true
  ] 
, "someObject" : 
  { "boolkey" : true
  , "somekey" : "somevalue"
  } 
} 

Note also that sorting arrays might not be a good idea in some cases.