Note, you may not have expected the -m flag. The not so secret, secret seems to be running the command exactly as you would expect. The first difficulty that I encountered was trying to get json.tool to format one file, to standard out. My vague plan was to pipe each file in the directory to the Python module json.tool, which would format the JSON, and then I could grab the formatted JSON and stuff it back into the original file. Armed with caffeine and enough Bash knowledge to be dangerous, I rolled up my sleeves (metaphorically because it was quite warm today, and I was wearing a short-sleeved shirt), and dove in (again, metaphorically because, unfortunately, I neither own a magic school bus that can shrink down and fit inside computers, nor is my computer a magical chalk drawing in Mary Poppins). That “feature” made it difficult to visually parse the results that I was trying to find. By default, grep’ing an unformatted JSON file will output the entire contents of the file if the grep regular expression finds a match.
Today, I found myself back at this problem again, when I was trying to grep my files to determine all the values for a certain property.
After trying to format my JSON with Emacs, then later Gedit, for some time, I gave up, copied several of the files to my Windows VM host, and formatted them with Notepad++ (Ctrl + Alt + m is the default keybinding, in case you’re wondering and/or have an aversion to running commands by clicking through menus). The solutions that I found involved either the Python module json.tool or major modes, both of which were new concepts to me, and neither of which actually formatted my JSON. This is a trivial task with the JSTool plugin for Notepad++, and I assumed it would be a well-solved problem for Emacs, so I went to the Googles. I had 96 unformatted JSON files that looked something like this (generated with ):Īt first, I thought that I’d only want to view several of the files, so I looked for an Emacs solution to pretty print JSON. If you’re feeling lucky but distracted, and like a good story, read on. If you’re feeling lucky but cautious, see the disclaimers at the end of this article. TL DR If you’re feeling lucky, here’s my handy solution to replace raw JSON with formatted JSON. I recently took some time to solve the problem of how to view all this data in a way that’s efficient and easy to understand.
For simple applications, looking at JSON strings in Notepad++ or pasting them into is all I need, but when I’m building big applications, talking to multiple REST endpoints, designing unit tests, mock objects and doing a bunch of modeling at the intersection of a UI and back end services, I can quickly find myself flooded with too many JSON responses for those solutions to be viable. By April Eggers, Senior Software Developer, FDIĪs a front-end developer, I use JSON – a lot.
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