easy way to validate json and print in same format we use about gsd-tools

[raphaelahrens]

Hi,

      except:
            print("Your JSON is broken, reloading to spit the error out\n\n")
            data = json.load(filehandle)
            quit()

This is strange, the Exception is caught and then the script tries to parse the file again?

Second by just using quit() it is not possible to check if the script ran successfully or not.
sys.exit with the message from the exception could replace the whole block.

    except json.JSONDecodeError as e:
        sys.exit(f"Your JSON is broken\n {e}")

Thirdly why was tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile not used?
I'm asking, because json.dumps could be replaced with json.dump and all the file handling/writing could be removed.
See below

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import sys
import json
import tempfile
import shutil

filename = sys.argv[1]

with open(filename, 'r') as filehandle:
    try:
        json_data = json.load(filehandle)
    except json.JSONDecodeError as e:
        sys.exit(f"Your JSON is broken\n {e}")
    tmp_path = None
    with tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile(mode='w+t', delete=False) as tmp_file:
        json.dump(json_data, tmp_file.file, indent=2)
        tmp_path = tmp_file.name
    shutil.move(tmp_path, filename)

There is also the option of using jq . --indent 2 "$file" > "$tmp"; mv "$tmp" "$file"

[joshbressers]

I moved this to the gsd-tools repo

json.tool 3.9 allows you to specify whitespace, and since @raphaelahrens pasted that jq command from let's just suggest that. Humans should not be touching this data (I understand they have to at the moment because we need better tools), I don't want to encourage bad behavior