Json whitespace formatter

Question

I couldn't quickly find Java code with googling to make serialized Json easier to read (this is a debugging library, obviously implementation code wouldn't use this as it's just more characters). This is not intended to be viewed in a web browser, this is intended for console output mostly. I'm fairly new to Json (that's probably why I don't know where to look for this), is there a use case that my code is missing?

public class JsonWhitespace {
    public static String toWhiteSpace(String noWhite) {
        StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();

        int tabCount = 0;
        boolean inArray = false;

        for(char c : noWhite.toCharArray()) {
            if (c == '{') {
                sb.append(c);
                sb.append(System.lineSeparator());
                tabCount++;
                printTabs(sb, tabCount);
            } else if(c == '}') {
                sb.append(System.lineSeparator());
                tabCount--;
                printTabs(sb, tabCount);
                sb.append(c);
            } else if(c == ',') {
                sb.append(c);
                if (!inArray) {
                    sb.append(System.lineSeparator());
                    printTabs(sb, tabCount);
                }
            } else if (c == '[') {
                sb.append(c);
                inArray = true;
            } else if (c == ']') {
                sb.append(c);
                inArray = false;
            } else {
                sb.append(c);
            }           
        }

        return sb.toString();
    }

    private static void printTabs(StringBuilder sb, int tabCount) {
        for(int i = 0; i < tabCount; i++) {
            sb.append('\t');
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

I think you need to ignore the contents of quoted values.

Add the flag:

    boolean inQuotes=false;

then, at the top of your if statement:

        if (c == '"') {
            inQuotes=!inQuotes;
        }
        if (!inQuotes) {
            if (c == '{') {
                sb.append(c);
                sb.append(System.lineSeparator());
                tabCount++;
                printTabs(sb, tabCount);
            } else if(c == '}') {
                ...  // Your code
        } else {
            sb.append(c);
        }