Written by Paul Hudson @twostraws
When you use JSONEncoder
and Codable
to create JSON from your Swift data, it comes out in a compressed format by default – it has all its excess whitespace removed. This makes it efficient for transferring over the network, but hard to debug because it’s just a big jumble of words.
For debugging purposes, it’s a good idea to enable pretty printing for your encoded JSON, which will tell JSONEncoder
to separate everything using line breaks and spaces so you can read it more easily.
To make this happen, set the outputFormatting
property of your JSON encoder to be .prettyPrinted
, like this:
let encoder = JSONEncoder()
encoder.outputFormatting = .prettyPrinted
Available from iOS 8.0
Did this solution work for you? Please pass it on!
Other people are reading…
About the Swift Knowledge Base
This is part of the Swift Knowledge Base, a free, searchable collection of solutions for common iOS questions.
Get my latest video for free
Learn about value types, functional programming, and protocol-oriented programming in this new video – it's free!