Given a file with a large JSON object all on one line like
{"versions":[{"count":2,"version":""},{"count":1,"version":"1.1.1"},{"count":14,"version":"2.9"},{...
How can I format this to be human readable in Vim?
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1Related StackOverflow Post: How to fix JSON indentation in vim? – Peter Rincker Jul 30 '18 at 15:37
Or you can install jq which is faster (written in C) from your package manager or from source and then in vim, type :
:%!jq .
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1
This one-liner works well to format JSON in Vim into a human readable form:
:%!python -m json.tool
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1Do you memorize that and type it every time or do you use some kind of alias? – asedsami Dec 13 '19 at 17:05
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I tend to use the
:%!jq .answer these days, as I do less with Python and tend to havejqinstalled on my systems for any JSON work in CLI. I also get notifications for this SO question quite often, so it helps me not to forget :P I prefer vim with minimal customization, no plugins, etc, which is another reason thejqsolution is now my preferred. – ljs.dev Dec 14 '19 at 7:37 -
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3Just a warning that this will escape some characters into ASCII only. So if you want UTF8 encoding jq is the better option. – AndrewHarvey Feb 5 at 3:01
To format in a deterministic way, we need to sort the hash. None of the other answers did that for me, so I created my own:
function! FormatJson()
python << EOF
import vim
import json
try:
buf = vim.current.buffer
json_content = '\n'.join(buf[:])
content = json.loads(json_content)
sorted_content = json.dumps(content, indent=4, sort_keys=True)
buf[:] = sorted_content.split('\n')
except Exception, e:
print e
EOF
endfunction
Usage:
:call FormatJson()
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Welcome to Vi and Vim! Nice first answer; it's interesting that you consider the sorting aspect! – D. Ben Knoble Nov 19 '19 at 15:26
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About the sorting I'm pretty sure
jqmentionned in SebMa answers has a--sort-keysoption which would do the job. But it's cool to write your own implementation too :) – statox♦ Nov 19 '19 at 16:23
If PHP is available, add the tool jf as a JSON Formatter by Composer:
$ composer global require codegear/json-formatter
Then Format current file:
:%!jf %
Or add a keymap in vimrc:
nnoremap <Leader>jf :%!jf %<CR>
I use this :Jsonf command. It's can format unicode.
command! Jsonf :execute '%!python -c "import json,sys,collections,re; sys.stdout.write(re.sub(r\"\\\u[0-9a-f]{4}\", lambda m:m.group().decode(\"unicode_escape\").encode(\"utf-8\"),json.dumps(json.load(sys.stdin, object_pairs_hook=collections.OrderedDict), indent=2)))"'
