Pretty-Printing JSON with Python's JSON Tool

today's quick tip is something that was widely retweeted after my "debugging http" talk at the ever-fabulous whiskyweb conference last weekend. when working with json on the commandline, here's a quick tip for showing the json in a nicer format:

curl http://api.joind.in | python -mjson.tool

you need python installed, but the json extension is probably included, and that's all you need for this tool. the result is something like:

you can also use this approach to present json data that has been captured to another file, for example, it's a handy trick that i use often when developing something with json as a data format.