Make JSON legible with BBEdit

bbedit-pretty-json-readme.txt

2016/03/15
Tested with BBEdit 11.5 / OS X 10.11.3 / Python 2.7.10

http://grokin.gs/blog/elegant-json-pretty-print-for-bbedit/

Place the script (or a link to this script) in the ~/Library/Application Support/BBEdit/Text Filters directory
Restart BBEdit.
The new filter should be under: "Test > Apply Text Filter > bbedit-pretty-json"

bbedit-pretty-json.sh

#!/bin/bash
python -c "import sys, json; print json.dumps(json.load(sys.stdin), indent=2)"

First off - many thanks for this bit of magic. Majorly helpful while editing in BBEdit. One thing I wanted to mention: Folks may want to determine the right folder by going BBEdit --> Folders --> Text Filters. This opens up Finder at that location.

For some reason, on my Mac (BigSur 11.5, BBEdit v14.0), it was in some convoluted location (~/Library/Containers/com.barebones.bbedit/Data/Library/Application Support/BBEdit/Text Filters) and not the regular ~/Library/Application Support/BBEdit/Text Filters

Me too. Thank you!

Hey! for me it did not work. I get the following message:
File "", line 1
import sys, json; print json.dumps(json.load(sys.stdin), indent=2)
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
Any ideas? (I use mac os Catalina 10.15.3 with BBedit 12.6.7)

Hi! As @michaelmaass says, Catalina uses Python 3 as standard instead of Python 2. Just did a quick google, and one of the changes is that the print statement has changed to a function and thus requires parentheses, which should also work fine in Python 2. So if you change line 2 to the following, it works: python -c "import sys, json; print(json.dumps(json.load(sys.stdin), indent=2))"

@maccer83 - Thank you. This fixed it for me.

If you have jq installed (which could be simply done via homebrew brew install jq), then the Format JSON filter could be as simple as

#!/bin/bash
jq .