How to see a large JSON file pretty printed on Ubu

Question

Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.

---

Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow.

Closed 7 months ago.

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.

Answer 1

Python JSON's module can do this too (python -m json.tool), e.g.:

cat myjsonfile.json | python -m json.tool > pretty.json

Answer 2

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

Answer 3

Do you have KDE or any other visual environment? If yes, have you tried using the chrome extension JSONView?

Answer 4

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!

Answer 5

Use the external tool option. This worked for me http://www.milosev.com/downloads/websphere/117-linux/ubuntu/454-json-prettifier-for-gedit.html

Answer 6

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.