describejson

Feed the describejson.py script some JSON on stdin and it will print a concise summary of the structure of the JSON.

The only option is --strictness to determine how strictly JSON objects and lists should be compared. In order of increasing strictness, the possible values are:

• type: compare everything by type only.
• length: compare lists and objects by length.
• keys: compare lists by equality, objects by keys.
• equal: compare objects and list by equality.

Strictness affects the amount of output you'll see. For example if a list contains two lists, describejson.py will just tell you that very concisely if you use --strictness type. If you want the fact that things differ in length or contents, use a higher strictness level.

You can see some examples of the script in use in this blog post: http://blogs.fluidinfo.com/terry/2012/08/09/describejson-a-python-script-for-summarizing-json-structure/

The output could probably be more verbose / helpful in some cases, but it's a difficult thing to get right, and the point is to produce a small summary omitting as much detail as possible.

Here's an example summarizing a 24M JSON file:

$ python describejson.py < sample.json 
1 dict of length 3. Values:
  1 int
  1 dict of length 4. Values:
    1 list of length 17993. Values:
      17993 dicts of length 5. Values:
        1 unicode
        1 int
        1 list of length 0.
        2 unicodes
    1 list of length 0.
    1 list of length 11907. Values:
      11907 dicts of length 5. Values:
        1 unicode
        1 int
        1 list of length 1. Values:
          1 unicode
        2 unicodes
    1 list of length 28068. Values:
      28068 dicts of length 5. Values:
        1 unicode
        1 int
        1 list of length 0.
        2 unicodes
  1 unicode

That's a 24 line summary of a 24M JSON file :-) Looking at the same file with python -m json.tool produces almost half a million lines of output.

Terry Jones ([email protected])
Aug 9, 2012