GitHub

Java SQL Formatting Library

Gradle CI Maven Central Codacy Badge Coverage Status License Apache 2.0 Issues PRs Welcome

Turn unreadable SQL into something you would actually want to review.

JSQLFormatter is a platform independent SQL formatter, beautifier and pretty printer by Manticore Projects. It is RDBMS agnostic, it preserves your comments, and it is driven by a real SQL grammar rather than by regular expressions – so it understands the structure of a statement instead of guessing at it.

Latest stable release: JSQLFormatter-5.3.jar

Development version: JSQLFormatter-5.4-SNAPSHOT.jar

GitHub Repository · Online Demo

What’s new in 5.4

Now licensed under Apache 2.0. Releases up to and including 5.3 were AGPL. From 5.4 onwards JSQLFormatter is Apache 2.0, which means you can embed it in commercial products, IDE plugins and internal tooling without the copyleft obligation.

A complete Visitor Pattern rewrite. The formatter used to be one long procedural pass with roughly seventy instanceof checks deciding what to render. Statements and expressions are now dispatched through JSQLParser’s own visitor interfaces:

Component

Responsibility

StatementFormatter

Dispatches SELECT, INSERT, MERGE, UPDATE, DELETE, DDL and session statements

ExpressionFormatter

Renders the full expression tower – operators, functions, CASE, sub-selects, literals

Renderer

Shared spelling, indentation and keyword-casing primitives

Two things follow from this. Supporting a new node type is now a single visit(...) override instead of another branch in a growing if chain. And every node type that is not explicitly handled still formats sensibly: a keyword-aware fallback walks the node’s own output, applies your configured keyword spelling to uppercase token runs, and passes quoted literals through untouched. No more raw, unformatted islands in the middle of an otherwise clean statement.

Built on JSQLParser 5.3.242, which brings massive parsing performance improvements.

Note

The EBNF and Railroad Diagram pages have been retired. The authoritative grammar reference now lives with JSQLParser itself.

See it work

update cfe.calendar set year_offset=?, settlement_shift=to_char(?),
friday_is_holiday=?, saturday_is_holiday=?, sunday_is_holiday=?
where id_calendar=?;

UPDATE cfe.calendar
SET year_offset = ?
    , settlement_shift = To_Char( ? )
    , friday_is_holiday = ?
    , saturday_is_holiday = ?
    , sunday_is_holiday = ?
WHERE id_calendar = ?
;

import com.manticore.jsqlformatter.JSQLFormatter;

String formattedSql = JSQLFormatter.format("SELECT * FROM table1");

java -jar JSQLFormatterCLI.jar -i queries.sql --ansi

Features

Grammar driven

Built on JSQLParser. The SQL is genuinely parsed into an AST before anything is printed.

RDBMS agnostic

Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL and MariaDB, PostgreSQL, H2, DuckDB, BigQuery, Redshift, Databricks and Snowflake, from one grammar.

Broad coverage

Complex SELECT, INSERT INTO, MERGE, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE and ALTER, including WITH clauses, nested sub-selects, Oracle (+) joins and PostgreSQL :: casts.

Comments survive

Comments are anchored to the node they belong to, including comments wedged between keywords or inside join conditions. String literals that merely look like comments are left alone.

Syntax highlighting

ANSI for the terminal, HTML and RTF for documents and wikis.

Round-trips through Java

Import a SQL string out of Java source preserving variables, then export it back as a String, StringBuilder or MessageFormat.

Configurable

Indent width, comma placement and keyword, function and object casing – set per invocation, per file, or per statement.

Platform

Target

Notes

Java library

JAR from Maven Central

Command line

Executable JAR

Native binary

Static binary or shared library for Linux, Windows and macOS

NetBeans plugin

Eclipse, JEdit, Squirrel SQL and DBeaver planned