RealNitro’s Blog

Format JSON in vim using Python’s json.tool module

Dec 20th, 2010 by RealNitro

Based on this blogpost, use this Vim command to format the contents of a JSON file:
:%!python -m json.tool

That is all.

Posted in Life | 7 Comments

on 29 Sep 2011 at 20:351Adrian Rollett

thanks for the post! I added the following to my .vimrc, and now all I have to do to format JSON is select it in visual mode and hit \-j:

” format JSON
map j !python -m json.tool
on 29 Sep 2011 at 20:362Adrian Rollett

Ugh, the dog ate my html - should be:

” format JSON
map <Leader>j !python -m json.tool<CR>
on 29 Sep 2011 at 22:453RealNitro

Adrian: thx for the tip!
on 23 Feb 2012 at 17:034Harm

@Adrian:
It still ate the colon and percentage sign. These should be prefixed in front of the exclamation mark.
on 13 Jun 2012 at 15:595Adam

That’s awesome. Is there a python -m xml.tool?
on 13 Jun 2012 at 21:196RealNitro

There seems to be no xml formatting ‘tool’ in Python. You could use something like xmllint?
on 25 Mar 2013 at 11:067Julian

You can use “%!tidy -xml -q -i” to do xml formatting