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JavaScript: How can I generate formatted easy-to-read JSON straight from an object?

Possible Duplicate:
How can I beautify JSON programmatically?

I know how to generate JSON from an object using JSON.stringify, or in my case the handy jQuery JSON from Google Code.

Now this works fine, but the output is hard to read for humans. Is there an easy way, function, or whatever to output a neatly formatted JSON file?

This is what I mean:

JSON.stringify({a:1,b:2,c:{d:1,e:[1,2]}});

gives...

"{"a":1,"b":2,"c":{"d":1,"e":[1,2]}}"

I'd like something like this instead:

{
 "a":1,
 "b":2,
 "c":{
    "d":1,
    "e":[1,2]
 }
}

E.g., with newlines and tabs added. It's much easier to read for larger documents.

I'd like to do this ideally without adding any huge libraries, for example, not Prototype, YUI, or whatever.

Solution

  • JSON.stringify takes more optional arguments.

    Try:

     JSON.stringify({a:1,b:2,c:{d:1,e:[1,2]}}, null, 4); // Indented 4 spaces
 JSON.stringify({a:1,b:2,c:{d:1,e:[1,2]}}, null, "\t"); // Indented with tab

    From:

    How can I beautify JSON programmatically?

    It should work in modern browsers, and it is included in json2.js if you need a fallback for browsers that don't support the JSON helper functions. For display purposes, put the output in a <pre> tag to get newlines to show.