Help needed For Curl

[Omkumar2003]

Body

So I was using cURL (I’m a noob here,btw). I just noticed that there’s no way to prettify JSON output. When an API returns JSON, it just shows up as one long line.

cURL is such a big project, and JSON is one of the most commonly used data formats on the web. So why isn’t there a built-in feature to prettify JSON in cURL? Don’t you think that feature should be included?

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[Chamath-Adithya]

You’re right that cURL itself doesn’t have a built-in JSON pretty-print feature. The reason is that cURL’s main goal is to transfer data over HTTP/HTTPS and related protocols — it’s designed to be minimal and universal, not to format or manipulate the content it retrieves.
For prettifying JSON, most people pipe cURL output to a tool like jq or python:

curl https://api.example.com/data | jq

or

curl https://api.example.com/data | python -m json.tool

This keeps cURL lightweight while allowing flexible formatting using external tools.
It would be convenient if cURL had built-in JSON formatting, but for now, using jq or similar is the standard practice.

[khalidh1b]

Exactly! You’re right, cURL is meant to be a lightweight; universal data transfer tool, not a data formatter. JSON pretty printing falls outside its scope, which is why the standard practice is to pipe the output to tools like jq or Python’s json.tool