How to "pretty" format JSON output in Ruby on Rails

Question

I would like my JSON output in Ruby on Rails to be "pretty" or nicely formatted.

Right now, I call to_json and my JSON is all on one line. At times this can be difficult to see if there is a problem in the JSON output stream.

Is there way to configure to make my JSON "pretty" or nicely formatted in Rails?

Answer 1

The <pre> tag in HTML, used with JSON.pretty_generate, will render the JSON pretty in your view. I was so happy when my illustrious boss showed me this:

<% if @data.present? %>    <pre><%= JSON.pretty_generate(@data) %></pre> <% end %> 

Answer 2

Use the pretty_generate() function, built into later versions of JSON. For example:

require 'json' my_object = { :array => [1, 2, 3, { :sample => "hash"} ], :foo => "bar" } puts JSON.pretty_generate(my_object) 

Which gets you:

{   "array": [     1,     2,     3,     {       "sample": "hash"     }   ],   "foo": "bar" }