Guides

Format JSON without pasting it into someone else’s server

Beautify and minify are the two operations everyone needs and most online tools implement by POSTing your document to a backend. JSONParse formats from the same local index it uses to display the file.

Beautify

Formatting re-emits the document from the parsed index rather than running a regular expression over the text, so the output is structurally correct by construction. The indent unit is configurable — two spaces, four spaces or a tab — and the setting is remembered between visits.

{"users":[{"id":1,"name":"Ada","roles":["admin","dev"]},{"id":2,"name":"Grace"}]}

becomes

{
  "users": [
    {
      "id": 1,
      "name": "Ada",
      "roles": [
        "admin",
        "dev"
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": 2,
      "name": "Grace"
    }
  ]
}

Minify

Minify strips every byte of insignificant whitespace and re-emits the document on one line. Useful for fixtures, for pasting into an environment variable, and for measuring how much of a payload is formatting.

Format a subtree, not the whole file

Any node in the tree can be copied or downloaded formatted on its own. On a large document that is usually what you want: the interesting object is a few hundred bytes inside a few hundred megabytes, and you need it in a bug report, not the whole file.

Why this matters for anything sensitive

A production API response tends to contain customer records, tokens, internal identifiers and sometimes credentials. Pasting it into a formatter that round-trips through a server means that data has left your machine and now lives in someone else’s logs. JSONParse parses locally and makes no network request with your document, which is the only version of this guarantee that survives a security review.

Open the viewerNo sign-up, no upload, no file size dialog.

Last updated 2026-09-14.