Minifying JSON with Ruby

I've written about pretty-printing JSON in the past, but not about minifying it. Sometimes you don't want an overly verbose format, i.e. when entering logs, or where you're restrained on file-sizes.

Let's say that we have a nicely pretty-printed JSON file, such as:

{
    "key": [
        123,
        456
    ],
    "key2": "value"
}

If we want to minify the JSON, we can use the following:

$ ruby -rjson -e 'puts JSON.parse(ARGF.read).to_json' file.json
$ ruby -rjson -e 'puts JSON.parse(ARGF.read).to_json' < file.json

This then outputs it as the minified JSON string representation of the object above!

{"key":[123,456],"key2":"value"}