Style Or Format JSON Data In JQuery

In this post we will discuss how we can format or style the JSON you get from the server. Sometimes you may need to show the exact JSON you get from your API or from server in your web page. Normally if you just bind this JSON to any pre tag, it will look like just a straight line. Won’t it? To overcome this we have an option in jQuery . I hope you will like this.

Please see this article in my blog here.

Background

For the past few months I have been working with some Web API projects. As you all know the preferred output of an API is JSON, I am returning JSON from my API. I wanted to show this JSON in a Pre tag as a result, but in a formatted way or stylish way. Here I am going to explain how we can do this.

Using the code

Before getting started, please make sure that you have added the jQuery reference to your page.

<script src="scripts/jquery-2.2.3.js"></script>

Now let us say we are getting a JSON as follows from our API.

[{
    "AreaCode": "B697-31",
    "Revenue": 12747128.190000001
}, {
    "AreaCode": "B697-92",
    "Revenue": 7922559.1600000048
}, {
    "AreaCode": "B697-76",
    "Revenue": 7541039.540000001
}, {
    "AreaCode": "B697-46",
    "Revenue": 7076495.5800000066
}, {
    "AreaCode": "B553-131",
    "Revenue": 5738816.5099999979
}, {
    "AreaCode": "B553-193",
    "Revenue": 4608556.52
}, {
    "AreaCode": "B697-74",
    "Revenue": 3895194.1099999994
}, {
    "AreaCode": "D158-233",
    "Revenue": 3572808.989999996
}, {
    "AreaCode": "B697-78",
    "Revenue": 3512657.6999999937
}, {
    "AreaCode": "B672-31",
    "Revenue": 2955916.9800000032
}, {
    "AreaCode": "B553-46",
    "Revenue": 2806813.7100000042
}]

It will obviously looks like the preceding when you just append it to a pre tag.

                                       JSON in Pre Tag

Now we will format this JSON string with JQuery Parse and JQuery stringify method as follows.

var tmpData = JSON.parse(data);
var formattedData = JSON.stringify(tmpData, null, '\t');
$('#output').text(formattedData);

Here output is the id of our pre tag which we defined as follows.

<pre id="output"></pre>

Now if you bind the data after the formatting to pre tag, you will get an out put as follows.

                           JSON in Pre Tag Output

Conclusion

Did I miss anything that you may think is needed? Did you find this post useful? I hope you liked this article. Please share with me your valuable suggestions and feedback.

Your turn. What do you think?

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