How to Pretty Print a JSON File in Python

1. json.dumps Method
2. pprint Method

The content of JSON file could be messy if you read it to the string or load it.

For example, in one JSON file ,

[{"foo": "Etiam", "bar": ["rhoncus", 0, "1.0"]}]

If you load and then print it.

import json

with open(r"C:\test\test.json", "r") as f:
    json_data = json.load(f)

print(json_data)

[{"foo": "Etiam", "bar": ["rhoncus", 0, "1.0"]}]

The result is well readable compared to the standard format we normally see.

[
  {
    "foo": "Etiam",
    "bar": [
      "rhoncus",
      0,
      "1.0"
    ]
  }
]

json.dumps Method

json.dumps() function serializes the given obj to a JSON formatted str.

We need to give a positive integer to the keyword parameter indent in the json.dumps() function to pretty print the obj with the given indent level. If ident is set to be 0, it will only insert new lines.

import json

with open(r"C:\test\test.json", "r") as f:
    json_data = json.load(f)

print(json.dumps(json_data, indent=2))

[{"foo": "Etiam", "bar": ["rhoncus", 0, "1.0"]}]

pprint Method

pprint module gives the capability to pretty print Python data structures. pprint.pprint pretty prints a Python object to a stream followed by a newline.

import json
import pprint

with open(r"C:\test\test.json", "r") as f:
    json_data = f.read()
    json_data = json.loads(json_data)

pprint.pprint(json_data)

The JSON file data content will be pretty printed. And you could also define the indent by assigning indent parameter.

pprint.pprint(json_data, indent=2)