// Tutorial //

Python Pretty Print JSON

Published on August 3, 2022

Python

By Pankaj

While we believe that this content benefits our community, we have not yet thoroughly reviewed it. If you have any suggestions for improvements, please let us know by clicking the “report an issue“ button at the bottom of the tutorial.

We can use the Python json module to pretty-print the JSON data. The json module is recommended to work with JSON files. We can use the dumps() method to get the pretty formatted JSON string.

1. Python Pretty Print JSON String

import json

json_data = '[{"ID":10,"Name":"Pankaj","Role":"CEO"},' \
            '{"ID":20,"Name":"David Lee","Role":"Editor"}]'

json_object = json.loads(json_data)

json_formatted_str = json.dumps(json_object, indent=2)

print(json_formatted_str)

Output:

[
  {
    "ID": 10,
    "Name": "Pankaj",
    "Role": "CEO"
  },
  {
    "ID": 20,
    "Name": "David Lee",
    "Role": "Editor"
  }
]

First of all, we are using json.loads() to create the json object from the json string.
The json.dumps() method takes the json object and returns a JSON formatted string. The indent parameter is used to define the indent level for the formatted string.

2. Python Pretty Print JSON File

Let’s see what happens when we try to print a JSON file data. The file data is saved in a pretty printed format.

import json

with open('Cars.json', 'r') as json_file:
    json_object = json.load(json_file)

print(json_object)

print(json.dumps(json_object))

print(json.dumps(json_object, indent=1))

Output:

[{'Car Name': 'Honda City', 'Car Model': 'City', 'Car Maker': 'Honda', 'Car Price': '20,000 USD'}, {'Car Name': 'Bugatti Chiron', 'Car Model': 'Chiron', 'Car Maker': 'Bugatti', 'Car Price': '3 Million USD'}]
[{"Car Name": "Honda City", "Car Model": "City", "Car Maker": "Honda", "Car Price": "20,000 USD"}, {"Car Name": "Bugatti Chiron", "Car Model": "Chiron", "Car Maker": "Bugatti", "Car Price": "3 Million USD"}]
[
 {
  "Car Name": "Honda City",
  "Car Model": "City",
  "Car Maker": "Honda",
  "Car Price": "20,000 USD"
 },
 {
  "Car Name": "Bugatti Chiron",
  "Car Model": "Chiron",
  "Car Maker": "Bugatti",
  "Car Price": "3 Million USD"
 }
]

It’s clear from the output that we have to pass the indent value to get the JSON data into a pretty printed format.