Json whitespace formatter

Question

I couldn't quickly find Java code with googling to make serialized Json easier to read (this is a debugging library, obviously implementation code wouldn't use this as it's just more characters). This is not intended to be viewed in a web browser, this is intended for console output mostly. I'm fairly new to Json (that's probably why I don't know where to look for this), is there a use case that my code is missing?

public class JsonWhitespace {
 public static String toWhiteSpace(String noWhite) {
 StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
 int tabCount = 0;
 boolean inArray = false;
 for(char c : noWhite.toCharArray()) {
 if (c == '{') {
 sb.append(c);
 sb.append(System.lineSeparator());
 tabCount++;
 printTabs(sb, tabCount);
 } else if(c == '}') {
 sb.append(System.lineSeparator());
 tabCount--;
 printTabs(sb, tabCount);
 sb.append(c);
 } else if(c == ',') {
 sb.append(c);
 if (!inArray) {
 sb.append(System.lineSeparator());
 printTabs(sb, tabCount);
 }
 } else if (c == '[') {
 sb.append(c);
 inArray = true;
 } else if (c == ']') {
 sb.append(c);
 inArray = false;
 } else {
 sb.append(c);
 } 
 }
 return sb.toString();
 }
 private static void printTabs(StringBuilder sb, int tabCount) {
 for(int i = 0; i < tabCount; i++) {
 sb.append('\t');
 }
 }
}

• Cornelius Dol: This will be thrown off by any of the characters tested for occurring in a value string.

Answer 1

I think you need to ignore the contents of quoted values.

Add the flag:

 boolean inQuotes=false;

then, at the top of your if statement:

 if (c == '"') {
 inQuotes=!inQuotes;
 }
 if (!inQuotes) {
 if (c == '{') {
 sb.append(c);
 sb.append(System.lineSeparator());
 tabCount++;
 printTabs(sb, tabCount);
 } else if(c == '}') {
 ... // Your code
 } else {
 sb.append(c);
 }

• durron597: Aha, I knew I must've missed something.