Verifying JSON easily on the command line

You can pipe stdout into python -mjson.tool to validate it. It makes for quick and easy json validation on the command line.

We'll create a simple json file:

> somefile.txt
{"someval": "something", "anotherval": 3}

Now pipe this into json.tools and check the output.

$ cat somefile.txt | python -mjson.tool
{
    "anotherval": 3,
    "someval": "something"
}

Cool. It even formatted it nicely for us. Let's break it and see what happens.

Single quotes are not valid according rfc4627.

> somefile.txt
{'someval': 'something', 'anotherval': 3}

$ cat somefile.txt | python -mjson.tool
Expecting property name: line 1 column 2 (char 1)

Not the most useful traceback, but at least you know it's not valid.