Command line script to Pretty Print a JSON URL

Don’t you hate it when you curl an api for testing and get something ugly like:

curl http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=ruby
q=ruby","next_page":"?page=2&max_id=20407667370&q=ruby","results_per_page":15,"page":1,"completed_in":0.018639,"query":"ruby"}

Here’s a quick one line bash script to pretty print a json url using curl and ruby:

#!/bin/bash
curl $* | ruby -e "require 'rubygems';require 'json'; jj JSON.parse(STDIN.gets)"


Save it as ppcurl, set the permissions (chmod a+x ppcurl) and run it:
ppcurl http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=ruby

    {
      "created_at": "Thu, 05 Aug 2010 18:25:41 +0000",
      "profile_image_url": "http://a3.twimg.com/profile_images/326153315/twitterProfilePhoto_normal.jpg",
      "from_user": "der_kronn",
      "text": "interesting gem: "Zucker" http://bit.ly/9kiJ3I - cool to see, how flexible ruby is /cc @rbJL",
      "to_user_id": null,
      "metadata": {
        "result_type": "recent"
      },
      "id": 20407489891,
      "geo": null,
      "from_user_id": 20887268,
      "iso_language_code": "en",
      "source": "<a href="http://termtter.org/" rel="nofollow">Termtter</a>"
    }
  ],
  "since_id": 0,
  "refresh_url": "?since_id=20407667370&q=ruby",
  "next_page": "?page=2&max_id=20407667370&q=ruby",
  "page": 1,
  "results_per_page": 15,
  "completed_in": 0.0169860000000001,
  "query": "ruby"
}

Much nicer!