How to prettyprint a JSON file?

Question

I have a JSON file that is a mess that I want to prettyprint. What's the easiest way to do this in Python?

I know PrettyPrint takes an "object", which I think can be a file, but I don't know how to pass a file in. Just using the filename doesn't work.

Answer 1

The json module already implements some basic pretty printing in the dump and dumps functions, with the indent parameter that specifies how many spaces to indent by:

>>> import json >>> >>> your_json = '["foo", {"bar":["baz", null, 1.0, 2]}]' >>> parsed = json.loads(your_json) >>> print(json.dumps(parsed, indent=4, sort_keys=True)) [     "foo",      {         "bar": [             "baz",              null,              1.0,              2         ]     } ] 

To parse a file, use json.load():

with open('filename.txt', 'r') as handle:     parsed = json.load(handle)