PPJSON

Small command-line utility to pretty-print JSON files. Colour included.

Installation

npm -g install ppjson

Usage

JSON data can be supplied from a file, or piped through standard input:

ppjson < json.file
ppjson json.file
node spit-json-to-stdout.js | ppjson

Run man ppjson to access everything you're reading here.

Options

-a, --alphabetise               Order properties alphabetically
-c, --colour           [bool]   Colourise the prettified output
-i, --indent           [size=4] Indentation width, expressed in spaces
-m, --mutilate         [bool]   Unquote property identifiers
-p, --paged            [bool]   Show content in pager if longer than screen
-t, --tabs                      Use tabs to indent output instead of spaces
-u, --underline-urls   [bool]   Add underlines to URLs
-v, --version                   Print the program's version string and exit
-w, --write                     Write prettified data back to files

The [bool] options above are all enabled by default. You can disable them by passing 0, "false", "no" or "off" as values (their capitalisation doesn't matter):

# All these lines are equivalent
ppjson --mutilate=no
ppjson --mutilate OFF
ppjson --mutilate 0
ppjson  -m0
ppjson --mutilate false

Option order is inconsequential: it doesn't matter if they're listed before or after a filename:

# Same damn thing:
ppjson -m0 file.json
ppjson file.json -m0

Examples

Use 2 spaces for indentation instead of 4:

ppjson --indent=2 file.json

Disable colours:

ppjson -c0 < file.json

Don't remove quote marks from property names:

ppjson -m false file.json
ppjson --mutilate nah < file.json

Yes, I really did include "nah" as a possible synonym for a false boolean value. Try it.

Customising colours

If you'd like to change the colours, you can do so with environment variables. Drop the following into your .bash_profile or shell equivalent:

export PPJSON_COLOURS='s=38;5;2:n=38;5;2:t=38;5;6:f=38;5;6:n=38;5;6:p=38;5;8:e=38;5;1;u='
 
# Older format which uses colour indexes 
export PPJSON_COLOUR_STRINGS=2
export PPJSON_COLOUR_NUMBERS=2
export PPJSON_COLOUR_TRUE=6
export PPJSON_COLOUR_FALSE=6
export PPJSON_COLOUR_NULL=6
export PPJSON_COLOUR_PUNCT=8
export PPJSON_COLOUR_ERROR=1

Default values are depicted above. The syntax of PPJSON_COLOURS is similar to GREP_COLORS. Each single-letter field corresponds to a different part of the output that can be styled:

s  # Strings 
n  # Numbers 
t  # True 
f  # False 
n  # Null 
p  # Punctuation (colons and brackets) 
e  # Error highlighting 
u  # Unquoted property keys