JSON Formatter

How to use it

1. Paste any JSON payload into the left panel — from an API response, a config file, or a log line.
2. Click Format for a readable 2-space indent, or Minify to strip all whitespace.
3. If your data contains non-ASCII text (Chinese, emoji, accented letters) and you need a transport-safe form, tick Escape Unicode to turn those characters into \uXXXX sequences.
4. Tick Sort keys if you want object keys alphabetised for cleaner diffs.
5. Invalid JSON shows the exact line and column plus the offending line, so you can fix it instead of hunting for a missing comma.

Common use cases

• Debugging an API response — paste the payload, format it, and read nested structures that were one long line.
• Preparing config files — validate a package.json, tsconfig.json or CI YAML-adjacent JSON before it reaches a build.
• Escaping for transport — generate a Unicode-escaped variant for a JSON string embedded inside another format that dislikes raw non-ASCII bytes.
• Comparing before/after — sorted keys make two near-identical objects visibly different.

Why it stays private

Everything runs through the browser's own JSON.parse. Nothing is uploaded, so you can safely format configuration that contains secrets, internal URLs or personal data.

FAQ

Q: Can I use it offline? A: After the page loads once, yes — formatting, validation and minification happen entirely locally.

Q: What is "Escape Unicode" for? A: It converts every non-ASCII character to its \uXXXX form. Some APIs, databases and protocol layers break when they receive raw UTF-8 JSON, so this produces a "pure ASCII" JSON string.

Q: How big can the input be? A: Practically, a few megabytes. Very large files are handled in your browser's memory; if your browser slows down, try minifying first and use a file-based tool for gigantic exports.