How to display JSON string in a human readable format on Linux

Last updated on August 27, 2020 by Dan Nanni

When you are developing a web application, you may often deal with JSON-formatted input/output. When you are inspecting such JSON-formatted data, you may want to see it in a human-readable format (e.g., with proper indentation and line breaks).

In this case, you can use Python's JSON tool. This tool is used to validate and pretty-print any JSON-formatted text. It can be invoked with Python interpreter with -m option.

For example:

$ JSON_STRING='{"name":"Google","location":{"street":"1600 Amphitheatre Parkway","city":"Mountain View","state":"California","country": "US"},"employees":[{"name":"Michael","division":"Engineering"},{"name":"Laura","division":"HR"},{"name":"Elise","division":"Marketing"}]}'
$ echo $JSON_STRING | python -mjson.tool

{
    "employees": [
        {
            "division": "Engineering",
            "name": "Michael"
        },
        {
            "division": "HR",
            "name": "Laura"
        },
        {
            "division": "Marketing",
            "name": "Elise"
        }
    ],
    "location": {
        "city": "Mountain View",
        "country": "US",
        "state": "California",
        "street": "1600 Amphitheatre Parkway"
    },
    "name": "Google"
}

If you are looking to extract individual elements from a JSON-formatted string, you may want to use a more powerful JSON parsing tool such as jq.

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