I saw a piece of code on Mango Station today and I thought it was pretty good, so I reposted it. The following is the original text.
Format JSON data in string form to be indented. Usually, the JSON string converted using json_encode is not indented. This method is much better.
Here I use tab indentation by default. If you want to change it to spaces, just replace the variable $indentStr.
/**
* Indents a flat JSON string to make it more human-readable.
* @param string $json The original JSON string to process.
* @return string Indented version of the original JSON string.
*/
function indent ($json) {
$result = '';
$pos = 0;
$strLen = strlen($json);
$indentStr = ' ';
$newLine = "n";
$prevChar = '';
$outOfQuotes = true;
for ( $i=0; $i<=$strLen; $i++) {
// Grab the next character in the string.
$char = substr($json, $i, 1);
// Are we inside a quoted string?
if ($char == '"' && $prevChar != '\') {
$outOfQuotes = !$outOfQuotes;
// If this character is the end of an element,
// output a new line and indent the next line.
} else if(($char == '}' || $char == ']') && $ outOfQuotes) {
$result .= $newLine;
$pos --;
for ($j=0; $j<$pos; $j++) {
$result .= $indentStr ;
}
}
// Add the character to the result string.
$result .= $char;
// If the last character was the beginning of an element,
// output a new line and indent the next line.
if (($char == ',' || $char == '{' || $char == '[') && $outOfQuotes) {
$result .= $newLine;
if ($char == '{' || $char == '[') {
$pos ++;
}
for ( $j = 0; $j < $pos; $j++) {
$result .= $indentStr;
}
}
$prevChar = $char;
}
return $result;
}