VoriTools

Minify, escape and format JSON text

This page works on JSON text in a single box: remove the formatting whitespace, escape quotes and backslashes so the text can be embedded in a string, undo that escaping, or reprint the document with 4-space indentation.

Runs locally in your browser

How to minify, escape or format JSON text

This page works on JSON text in a single box: remove the formatting whitespace, escape quotes and backslashes so the text can be embedded in a string, undo that escaping, or reprint the document with 4-space indentation.

All four operations run in the browser and the text is never uploaded. Minify and Format validate the input first and leave it untouched when it is not valid JSON; Escape and Unescape are text transforms that also work on fragments.

  1. Paste or type JSON into the box. Indentation and line breaks do not matter; Minify and Format validate the document before they act.
  2. Minify JSON removes spaces, tabs and line breaks outside strings and reports the character count in the status line. It is text minification, not ZIP or gzip compression.
  3. Escape JSON turns quotes and backslashes into their escaped form for embedding in another string; Unescape reverses exactly that.
  4. Format JSON reprints a valid document with 4-space indentation. Copy puts the current text on the clipboard and Clear empties the box.
  5. Invalid input is reported with the browser’s message in the status line, and the text in the box stays as you typed it.

The four operations and their limits

What Minify removes

Minify walks the text and removes spaces, tabs and line breaks only outside string literals, so the double space in "two words" survives while the indentation around it goes away. The input must parse as strict JSON first; if it does not, the text is left alone and the status line shows why.

The result is not a ZIP or gzip file: nothing is compressed byte-wise, the text simply gets shorter because removable whitespace is gone. The status line reports the exact character count before and after.

Escape and Unescape are one pass

Escape converts every backslash to a doubled backslash and every quote to a backslash-quote, which is what embedding JSON in a JavaScript or JSON string requires. Unescape runs a single left-to-right pass over the text and reverses exactly those two sequences.

Other escape sequences are not interpreted: \n, \t and \uXXXX pass through Unescape unchanged, and Escape does not touch them either. Because the pair round-trips every tested sequence, escaped output can be unescaped back to the original text.

Format, validation and limits

Format JSON parses the document and reprints it with 4-space indentation. Because the document is re-serialised, number literals are normalised — 1.0 prints as 1 — and \uXXXX escapes become the characters they denote.

The parser is strict JSON: comments, single quotes and trailing commas are rejected. There is no server-side size limit; the practical limit is the browser’s memory, and Copy hands over the current text of the box.

Recent tools: