JSON Formatter

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is the de facto data format of the modern web — API responses, configuration files, log lines, and countless developer tools all speak JSON. But JSON as it actually travels over the wire is rarely readable: APIs commonly return it minified, as one long unbroken line, which makes it painful to scan for a specific field or spot a structural mistake by eye. A formatter's job is simple but genuinely useful — turn that wall of text into properly indented, human-readable structure, or do the reverse and strip it back down for production.

This tool runs entirely in your browser. Pasted JSON is parsed and re-serialized locally with no server round-trip, which matters more than it might seem: JSON blobs frequently contain API keys, internal URLs, user records, or other data you'd rather not paste into a random website's backend. Because nothing leaves your device, and because the tool keeps working offline once loaded, it's safe to use even with sensitive payloads pulled from a production system.

Formatting ("Format") pretty-prints the input with 2-space indentation, making nested objects and arrays easy to scan and diff. Minifying ("Minify") does the opposite — it strips all non-essential whitespace to produce the smallest possible valid JSON, which is exactly what you want before shipping a config file or embedding a JSON literal in a script where every byte counts. Both directions use the same underlying parser, so switching between them never silently changes the data itself, only its whitespace.

Beyond pretty-printing, the tool doubles as a validator. If the input isn't syntactically valid JSON — a trailing comma, an unquoted key, a missing bracket — it reports the parse error instead of guessing at what you meant or silently producing broken output. That immediate feedback is often the fastest way to track down a malformed API response or a hand-edited config file that won't load.

Once you have a formatted or minified result, copy it directly, or use the “Send to” button to pass it straight into another tool in this toolbox — useful, for instance, when you want to check the byte length of a minified payload or hash a canonicalized JSON blob.