Pretty print JSON on the command line with Python

I’m often dealing with little bits of JSON, and sometimes it’s helpful to pretty-print them for readability.

Python has a handy tool to make that easy on the command line: json.tool.

E.g.

echo '{"foo": "bar", "thing": { "baz": 42 } }' | python -m json.tool

prints:

{
    "foo": "bar",
    "thing": {
        "baz": 42
    }
}

If you’re on Mac, you can convert JSON in the clipboard to its pretty-printed form with:

pbpaste | python -m json.tool | pbcopy

Ubuntu equivalent with xclip:

xclip -o | python -m json.tool | xclip

I have that aliased to pbj.

Mac:

alias pbj='pbpaste | python -m json.tool | pbcopy'

Ubuntu:

alias pbj='xclip -o | python -m json.tool | xclip'

Tech mentioned

• bash
• Python
• Unix