Alphabetize JSON

This simple Python script very quickly imports a JSON file, alphabetizes/sorts it by keys and values and then exports it.

Requirements

There are a handful of requirements in order to leverage this script.

Python Version

The use of f-strings were intentionally avoided to ensure support for lower 3.x versions of Python. That being said, this script was only tested in versions 3.6, 3.7 and 3.8.

Dependencies

Only the built-in modules below are required for this script:

os
sys
json

Installation

To use the script you can do one of the following:

Download the alphabetize_json.py file
View the raw contents of alphabetize_json.py in GitHub and copy/paste them into a new Python script file

Clone the full repository with the command below.

git clone https://github.com/jeffshurtliff/alphabetize_json

Usage

The script can be executed in one of two ways:

The script can be executed without any arguments and the user will be prompted for the import and export (optional) files.
The JSON file to import can be passed as a script argument when running the script.
```
python3 alphabetize_json.py 'C:\\Temp\\my_data.json'
```

Demonstration

Example JSON files can be found in the examples/ directory within this repository, which are leveraged in this demonstration.

Let's assume we have a JSON file (unsorted.json) containing the following data:

{
    "Ross": [
        "We were on a break!",
        "My sandwich!",
        "Front and back!"
    ],
    "Rachael": [
        "It's a metaphor, Daddy!",
        "Julie!"
    ],
    "Joey": [
        "That's how they do pants!",
        "Joey doesn't share food!"
    ]
}

We will also assume in this demonstration that we chose to clone the full repository (see the Installation section above) and are running the script against the examples/unsorted.json file from the repository's root directory.

The output below shows how the script would work when not supplying the file name as a script argument.

[myuser@workstation ~/alphabetize_json]$ python3 alphabetize_json.py
Enter the full path to the JSON file to import:
> /home/myuser/alphabetize_json/examples/unsorted.json
Enter the full path of the file to export: (Press enter to overwrite the import file)
> /home/myuser/alphabetize_json/examples/sorted.json
The new data has been written to /home/myuser/alphabetize_json/examples/sorted.json.

The sorted JSON file would then have the sorted data, as shown below.

{
    "Joey": [
        "Joey doesn't share food!", 
        "That's how they do pants!"
    ], 
    "Rachael": [
        "It's a metaphor, Daddy!", 
        "Julie!"
    ], 
    "Ross": [
        "Front and back!", 
        "My sandwich!", 
        "We were on a break!"
    ]
}

Note on Formatting

The JSON file that is exported will actually be exported in a "minified" way with all data on a single line, as shown below.

{"Joey": ["Joey doesn't share food!", "That's how they do pants!"], "Rachael": ["It's a metaphor, Daddy!", "Julie!"], "Ross": ["Front and back!", "My sandwich!", "We were on a break!"]}

However, you can easily leverage an online JSON formatter or Python to "prettify" the output if needed.

Issues

Issues can be reported on the Issues page for the repository on GitHub.