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
    9 Mind-Blowing Canvas Demos

    The <canvas> element has been a revelation for the visual experts among our ranks.  Canvas provides the means for incredible and efficient animations with the added bonus of no Flash; these developers can flash their awesome JavaScript skills instead.  Here are nine unbelievable canvas demos that...

  • By
    Serving Fonts from CDN

    For maximum performance, we all know we must put our assets on CDN (another domain).  Along with those assets are custom web fonts.  Unfortunately custom web fonts via CDN (or any cross-domain font request) don't work in Firefox or Internet Explorer (correctly so, by spec) though...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Drag &#038; Drop Elements to the Trash with MooTools 1.2

    Everyone loves dragging garbage files from their desktop into their trash can. There's a certain amount of irony in doing something on your computer that you also do in real life. It's also a quick way to get rid of things. That's...

  • By
    Instagram For MooTools

    If you're still rocking an iPhone and fancy taking a photo every now and then, you'd be crazy not to be using an app called Instagram.  With Instagram you take the photos just as you would with your native iPhone camera app, but Instagram...

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!