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
    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...

  • By
    Camera and Video Control with HTML5

    Client-side APIs on mobile and desktop devices are quickly providing the same APIs.  Of course our mobile devices got access to some of these APIs first, but those APIs are slowly making their way to the desktop.  One of those APIs is the getUserMedia API...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    TextboxList for MooTools and jQuery by Guillermo Rauch

    I'll be honest with you: I still haven't figured out if I like my MooTools teammate Guillermo Rauch. He's got a lot stacked up against him. He's from Argentina so I get IM'ed about 10 times a day about how great Lionel...

  • By
    CSS Text Overlap

    One of the important functions of CSS is to position elements. Margin, padding, top, left, right, bottom, position, and z-index are just a few of the major players in CSS positioning. By using the above spacing...

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!