Pretty-printing JSON and XML on Mac OSX | Hacker News Reader

Pretty-printing JSON and XML on Mac OSX

richardlog.com

32 pointsrickette10 comments

Nice! You can set up the following aliases in ~/.zshrc (or ~/.bashrc):

  alias json="python -mjson.tool"
  alias xml="xmllint --format -"

then pipe into them like so:

  echo '{"one": 1}' | json
  echo "<one>1</one>" | xml

My personal toolkit:

JSONView Chrome Extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chklaanhfefbnpoihc...

XML Tree Chrome Extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gbammbheopgpmaagmc...

And JSONlint.com to copy/paste JSON from wherever: http://jsonlint.com/

Also love that Chrome dev tools now pretty prints JSON returned from XHRs in the network response tab.

You could also just pipe it back into the clipboard with | pbcopy :)

A neat set of tricks, hopefully they'll replace jsonlint.com in my brain, and soon :)

pbcopy/pbpaste are handy enough to point out on their own merit. Handy little timesavers.

Just be aware that xmllint cleans up XML as well as formatting it, which can in rare circumstances cause some confusion.

So if the incoming XML had an empty tag specified as <tag></tag> xmllint will turn it into <tag/>. If you're specifically looking for <tag></tag> for some reason, then that could trip you up.

Shouldn't matter 99% of the time though.

IMO, the best way to spend $50 is on a Charles license - http://www.charlesproxy.com/

It's saved me countless hours debugging web services, be it JSON, XML, AMF, you name it. There's a free 30 day trial, and it runs on Mac OSX, Windows, and Linux.

Hey! Why not use https://github.com/nicksieger/jsonpretty for pretty printing JSON?

Because these work out-of-the-box on an installation of Snow Leopard or Lion - or in fact, any machine with python 2.6 and/or libxml2, which includes the latest Ubuntu LTS release.

There's definitely better tools out there if you're willing to install something - but these are great when you're in a pinch.

`tidy` also comes out of the box on OS X. It handles HTML too.

    tidy -xml -q -i < in.xml | less

etc.

I like the jsonview firefox plugin :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com