Formats and orders the keys in JSON data. If input is stdin, it will colorize the data via pygmentize (if available) and output to stdout. --no-color can be passed as argument to skip pygmentize. If a path is passed as argument, it will override the file with a formated version.

magicJSON.py

#!/usr/bin/env python

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

import json
import codecs
import sys
import locale
from subprocess import Popen, PIPE, STDOUT
import argparse

sys.stdout = codecs.getwriter(locale.getpreferredencoding())(sys.stdout);


# ARG PARSER

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser(description='Makes JSON readable.')

parser.add_argument("--no-color", dest="color", action="store_false", default=True, help="Don't pygmentize the output.")
parser.add_argument('infile', nargs='?', default=sys.stdin)

args = parser.parse_args()

isFile = type(args.infile) != file

print "isFile:",isFile

j = ""

# READ 

if isFile:
    with codecs.open(args.infile, "r", "utf-8") as f:
        print "loading file"
        j = json.loads(f.read())
else:
    print "loading stdin"
    data = sys.stdin.read()
    if (len(data) == 0):
        # print sys.stdout.encoding
        # line = u"\u0411"
        # sys.stdout.write(line)
        # print line
        print u"No data \uD83D\uDCA9"
        sys.exit()
    j = json.loads(data)



# PROCESS

jj = json.dumps(j,sort_keys=True, indent=4)


# WRITE 

if isFile:
    with codecs.open(args.infile, "w+", "utf-8") as f:
        f.write(jj)
else:
    if args.color:
        try:
            cmd = "pygmentize -O style=monokai -l json".split(" ")
            p = Popen(cmd, stdout=PIPE, stdin=PIPE, stderr=STDOUT)

            grep_stdout = p.communicate(input=jj)[0]
            print(grep_stdout)
        except Exception, e:
            print jj
    else:
        print jj

I have a bash function that takes an URL, calls curl and sends the resulting data to this script. Very useful for quick and dirty REST testing API's that output unformatted data.

Added argparse, --no-color, outputs colorless if pygmentize fails.