A few weeks ago I toyed with the idea of making a JSON prettifier myself. I often use these to re-format and debug a minified JSON payload.
I don’t want to trust external web-based tools (and don’t always want to open up an editor to format it), so like most of my projects I decided to write one myself.
And since this is a purely static website, I’m limited to JavaScript.
What I thought would be a fun coding challenge turned out to be … quite boring.
Formatting a JSON body takes just 3 lines of JavaScript.
json = JSON.parse(input);
result = JSON.stringify(json, null, 4); // stringify with 4 spaces at each level
resultsDiv.innerHTML = result;
This gets the JSON input from a textfield, parses it and through the magic of stringify() it gets pretty-printed straight away.
You can use this tool right here: JSON prettifier. It happens purely client-side and I don’t store any of the input.