`python3 -m json.tool somefile.json` or `cat foo.json | python3 -m json.tool` will print it in "one line per node" format. 3.9 introduces a --sort-keys switch for sorted objects also.
In my experience jq already does pretty the output. Maybe I'm missing something in your comment.
I hoped to find jq as a gem/module/library but I was disappointed. After days of searching and trying different things, I honestly could not find any powerful library or API for traversing and searching JSON.
> An object is an unordered collection of zero or more name/value pairs, where a name is a string and a value is a string, number, boolean, null, object, or array.
That is, you could rely on this and but be aware of it, is my point. Firefox, for example, will happily take an object with duplicates and report only the last one.
That said, I agree that being aware of this is important if you're emitting JSON. You'd think nobody would ever address a JSON object by its ordinal position, but programmers are lazy and worse, think they're clever. :)
As of Python 3.6 (in theory not guaranteed until Python 3.7), key order is preserved when reading and writing. That's a consequence of the fact Python dictionaries can now remember the order of insertion.
It's true that it doesn't support duplicate keys though (unless you pass in a different class to the object_pairs_hook parameter of loads() to replace its use of dict).
"The JSON syntax does not impose any restrictions on the strings used as names, does not require that name strings be unique, and does not assign any significance to the ordering of name/value pairs. These are all semantic considerations that may be defined by JSON processors or in specifications defining specific uses of JSON for data interchange."
https://www.ecma-international.org/wp-content/uploads/ECMA-4...
(I have actually encountered a order-dependent JSON-subset parser before, but to my mind, that code is broken)
JavaScript itself will also sort object keys if they are numeric, so `{a: "a", c: "c", b: "b", "1": 1};` will be transformed to `{1: 1, a: "a", c: "c", b: "b"}`.
The main apps I've seen that depend on JSON structure are for hashing, which would also be broken by whitespace / linebreak variances in pretty-printers.
Something like:
open file.json | select colors | each { ^echo $it.hex }
json_pp < somefile.json
The only thing I don't like is that it doesn't process commandline arguments. You have to pipe the file in. It is also fairly strict, I've run into a number of malformed JSON files that it rejects but other parsers would accept. Naked TRUE/FALSE statements are one thing it hates that are super common, especially from places like Google.