How can I pretty-print JSON using Go?

Does anyone know of a simple way to pretty-print JSON output in Go?

The stock http://golang.org/pkg/encoding/json/ package does not seem to include functionality for this (EDIT: it does, see accepted answer) and a quick google doesn't turn up anything obvious.

Uses I'm looking for are both pretty-printing the result of json.Marshal and just formatting a string full of JSON from wherever, so it's easier to read for debug purposes.

Solution 1:

By pretty-print, I assume you mean indented, like so

{
    "data": 1234
}

rather than

{"data":1234}

The easiest way to do this is with MarshalIndent, which will let you specify how you would like it indented via the indent argument. Thus, json.MarshalIndent(data, "", " ") will pretty-print using four spaces for indentation.

Solution 2:

The accepted answer is great if you have an object you want to turn into JSON. The question also mentions pretty-printing just any JSON string, and that's what I was trying to do. I just wanted to pretty-log some JSON from a POST request (specifically a CSP violation report).

To use MarshalIndent, you would have to Unmarshal that into an object. If you need that, go for it, but I didn't. If you just need to pretty-print a byte array, plain Indent is your friend.

Here's what I ended up with:

import (
    "bytes"
    "encoding/json"
    "log"
    "net/http"
)

func HandleCSPViolationRequest(w http.ResponseWriter, req *http.Request) {
    body := App.MustReadBody(req, w)
    if body == nil {
        return
    }

    var prettyJSON bytes.Buffer
    error := json.Indent(&prettyJSON, body, "", "\t")
    if error != nil {
        log.Println("JSON parse error: ", error)
        App.BadRequest(w)
        return
    }

    log.Println("CSP Violation:", string(prettyJSON.Bytes()))
}