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Just reading through the AWS CLI docs, and I've noticed that all JSON output is indented (i.e. "pretty" formatted)...

  • Doesn't this add a disproportionate amount of bloat to the responses?
  • If so, why would they choose to keep "pretty" formatting?
  • Is there a way to disable this?
Nick Grealy
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JSON doesn't care whether a JSON document is pretty-printed or not. So it makes sense to use the most human-readable presentation: debuggability is usually more important than shaving off a couple of bytes.

Note also that you're reading docs for a command line tool. This means that extra output is quite cheap: the costliest part is generating and filtering the data, followed by displaying the data on a terminal emulator GUI. Formatting and outputting the data is nearly free. The most effective way to limit the amount of output is to reduce the amount of data. By making the output human-readable, the user can more easily refine the query to select only those parts they are interested in.

If data is transferred over a network or stored on or in memory, the data representation does matter. However, compression makes a bit of whitespace irrelevant. Sure, less is better, but not by such a margin that it generally makes sense to sacrifice readability.

amon
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    I think your second point is the important one: these operations are not high volume (at least for the individual user), so whitespace is largely irrelevant. Plus, it compresses well. – kdgregory Nov 17 '16 at 12:04