Indent JSON with JavaScript

By  on  

Working with XML and JavaScript is a nightmare, which is why JSON has become gold in the development community.  Hell, I even wrote a function to turn XML to JSON with JavaScript.  If you want to turn an existing object into well formatted JSON, you can you JSON.stringify(obj), but you already know that.  What you may not know is that you can do pretty formatting when generating JSON from objects!

The secret is using the third JSON.stringify argument which represents the space indentation levels:

var formatted = JSON.stringify(myObject, null, 2);

/*
	Result:

	{
		"myProp": "myValue",
		"subObj": {
			"prop": "value"
		}
	}

*/

The resulting JSON representation will be formatted and indented with two spaces!

Recent Features

  • By
    CSS 3D Folding Animation

    Google Plus provides loads of inspiration for front-end developers, especially when it comes to the CSS and JavaScript wonders they create. Last year I duplicated their incredible PhotoStack effect with both MooTools and pure CSS; this time I'm going to duplicate...

  • By
    fetch API

    One of the worst kept secrets about AJAX on the web is that the underlying API for it, XMLHttpRequest, wasn't really made for what we've been using it for.  We've done well to create elegant APIs around XHR but we know we can do better.  Our effort to...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Create a Trailing Mouse Cursor Effect Using MooTools

    Remember the old days of DHTML and effects that were an achievement to create but had absolutely no value? Well, a trailing mouse cursor script is sorta like that. And I'm sorta the type of guy that creates effects just because I can.

  • By
    CSS Tooltips

    We all know that you can make shapes with CSS and a single HTML element, as I've covered in my CSS Triangles and CSS Circles posts.  Triangles and circles are fairly simply though, so as CSS advances, we need to stretch the boundaries...

Discussion

  1. MaxArt

    For more advanced formatting, I’ve developed a tool for the intent:
    https://github.com/MaxArt2501/json-fmt
    It works a client library or a server module for node/io.js, has a CLI, and a Grunt and a Gulp plugin.

    Of course, if you need speed just use JSON.stringify.

    Sorry for the self-promotion.

  2. You can also format a JSON file in the terminal with a single command.

    python -m json.tool unformatted.json > formatted.json

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!