Pretty Printing Unformatted Json In C#

Occasionally, you will find yourself in a position where you have unformatted or poorly formatted JSON, and you would like to view it formatted, also known as pretty printed.

There are a bunch of online resources for this, such as this one, this one and this one

But writing a few lines of code to solve this problem is very trivial, using the types found in the System.Text.Json namespace.

The code will be as follows:

using System.Text.Json;

string json = """
{
  "name": "James Bond","age": 45, "agency": "MI-6", "status":{ "retired":true, "code":"007"}
}
""";

var formattedJson = JsonNode.Parse(json);
Console.Write(formattedJson);

This will output the following:

{
  "name": "James Bond",
  "age": 45,
  "agency": "MI-6",
  "status": {
    "retired": true,
    "code": "007"
  }
}

It is trivial to refactor this to accept the unformatted JSON as input and then wrap the code in a LinqPad script, a console application, or a WebAPI for routine access.

If you are using Newtonsoft.Json, the code is even simpler:

var formattedJson = JToken.Parse(json);
Console.Write(formattedJson);

Happy hacking!