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I would like to hear your suggestions on how to handle a large (40MB) JSON file on Ubuntu. I would like to see it pretty printed in vim or gedit or any other editor. One can find numerious tutorials on how to prettify the JSON, however, they do not have to deal with large input. I also imagine I could pipe the data through pygments or any other syntax highlighter. I am curious to hearing your ideas.
Example download:
wget -O large-dataset.json http://data.wien.gv.at/daten/wfs?service=WFS&request=GetFeature&version=1.1.0&typeName=ogdwien:BAUMOGD&srsName=EPSG:4326&outputFormat=json
Please mind the download size!
EDIT: I found out that meld is working somewhat. The application does not load the whole file at once which would block the user interface. Instead it sequentially reads the file content.
Python JSON's module can do this too (python -m json.tool
), e.g.:
cat myjsonfile.json | python -m json.tool > pretty.json
If you just want to visualize (and search) a json file, Firefox does a pretty good job. I don't have a 40MB
file on hand, but it easily handled a 9MB one.
Just drag the JSON file to Firefox, or run:
firefox your_file.json
Do you have KDE or any other visual environment? If yes, have you tried using the chrome extension JSONView?
jq is a lightweight commandline JSON processor and works well!
for this you need to install jq with the command below(if you are using apt package manager).
sudo apt-get install jq
Below command will pretty json to a new file.
jq '.' non-pretty.json > pretty.json
Also we can filter the json with jq, I found it to be very helpful while working with large geojson files, for instance below command will save only properties of first feature.
jq '.features[0].properties' geojson_file.json > pretty.json
Hope this will be helpful!
The core usage is pretty formatting large json. I tested Chrome extension JSON View with 25MB json file. It crashes on loading this as a local file or from network. By crash, I mean JSON will not get formatted and on looking into JSON view options, you will get a crash message. I also tried similar addons for firefox. I tried online json formatters as well.
Found this library - jsonpps. Works pretty well to pretty format large json from command line, taking input and saving the formatted json as separate file. It can also save in the same file (need optional parameter)
One drawback, To install and run, one should be familier with Java and Maven.
To install & run:
git clone https://github.com/bazaarvoice/jsonpps.git
mvn clean package
cd target
java -jar jsonpps-1.2-SNAPSHOT.jar -o /path/to/output.json /path/to/largeInput.json
This solution is not restricted to Ubuntu. It should work on any operating system.
I usually use Sublime Text for this purpose. There is a dedicated plugin for this job.
The plugin Pretty JSON parses the JSON contents selected, and prints them in a structured way.
All you need to do is to select the contents and press Ctrl+Alt+j.
Use the external tool option.
This worked for me
http://www.milosev.com/downloads/websphere/117-linux/ubuntu/454-json-prettifier-for-gedit.html