{"id":354,"date":"2011-11-16T15:25:00","date_gmt":"2011-11-16T20:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=354"},"modified":"2011-12-26T12:06:31","modified_gmt":"2011-12-26T17:06:31","slug":"beautifying-json-in-emacs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/?p=354","title":{"rendered":"Beautifying JSON In Emacs"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I really like JSON<\/a>. It’s the perfect mechanism for serializing data; much better, in my opinion, than the typical XML solution. That said, I don’t use it enough to justify installing one of the really nice packages that deal with it such as Steve Yegge’s js2-mode<\/a> or Edward O’Connor’s json.el<\/a>. Still, I thought it would be nice to have an Emacs utility that could transform JSON into a standard, readable format. <\/p>\n

The other day I came across a post in Richard Ketteierij’s richardlog<\/a> blog about pretty-printing JSON and XML on Mac OSX<\/a>. His post had nothing to do with Emacs; it was merely a way of writing reformatted JSON to a file. It occurred to me that this was just what I needed for the occasional lightweight reformatting of JSON. It should work for any system with Python 2.6 or greater installed. <\/p>\n

It turns out that the Python distribution comes with a json.tool<\/code> module that does the work of reformating JSON. For example, here <\/p>\n

{\"father\"<\/span>:{\"name\"<\/span>:\"John Smith\"<\/span>, \"age\"<\/span>:45, \"employer\"<\/span>:\"YoYodyne, inc.\"<\/span>},\r\n\"mother\"<\/span>:{\"name\"<\/span>:\"Wilma Smith\"<\/span>, \"age\"<\/span>:42},\r\n\"children\"<\/span>:[{\"name\"<\/span>:\"William Smith\"<\/span>, \"age\"<\/span>:15},\r\n         {\"name\"<\/span>:\"Sally Smith\"<\/span>,\"age\"<\/span>:17}]}\r\n<\/pre>\n
{\r\n    \"children\"<\/span>: [\r\n        {\r\n            \"age\"<\/span>: 15, \r\n            \"name\"<\/span>: \"William Smith\"<\/span>\r\n        }, \r\n        {\r\n            \"age\"<\/span>: 17, \r\n            \"name\"<\/span>: \"Sally Smith\"<\/span>\r\n        }\r\n    ], \r\n    \"father\"<\/span>: {\r\n        \"age\"<\/span>: 45, \r\n        \"employer\"<\/span>: \"YoYodyne, inc.\"<\/span>, \r\n        \"name\"<\/span>: \"John Smith\"<\/span>\r\n    }, \r\n    \"mother\"<\/span>: {\r\n        \"age\"<\/span>: 42, \r\n        \"name\"<\/span>: \"Wilma Smith\"<\/span>\r\n    }\r\n}\r\n<\/pre>\n
 which is more readable and standardized in the sense that the items are in alphabetical order. As I said, it’s a simple and lightweight solution but quite handy if you deal with JSON only occasionally. If you use JSON a lot you probably have one of the packages mentioned above installed already (or should have). <\/p>\n
 Update<\/b>: an example of<\/del> to get rid of redundant \u201cexample.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I really like JSON. It’s the perfect mechanism for serializing data; much better, in my opinion, than the typical XML solution. That said, I don’t use it enough to justify installing one of the really nice packages that deal with … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[18],"class_list":["post-354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-emacs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=354"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":412,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354\/revisions\/412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/irreal.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
 is some JSON that I used when I first wrote about JSON<\/a> back in 2009 on my old blog. It’s easy to run this through json.tool<\/code> by selecting the code and typing \u3010Ctrl<\/span>+u<\/span> Meta<\/span>+|<\/span>\u3011 python -m json.tool<\/code>. Doing that yields <\/p>\n