My go-to tool for reading long JSON snippets
JSON is ubiquitous and I often run into it whilst developing or debugging.
When it’s in raw form like this …
it’s hard for a human to interpret.
For small snippets, I could copy-and-paste it into a text file and hand-prettify it. For long snippets, that’s obviously not scalable.
I stumbled upon a very useful tool for interpreting and analysing (extremely) long JSON snippets. The surprising thing is that it’s been around for a long time and I just never noticed. However, once I knew about it, I kept using it, and it’s now my go-to tool for analysing long JSON snippets.
The tool?
Mozilla Firefox.
Yes, the web browser. (It also helps that Firefox is my main browser.)
Here is a link to a random JSON file from the internet:
If you click on the link with Firefox you get something human-unfriendly:
However, if you open a file with a .json extension on your local computer , you get …
… which is a nice and useful and human-friendly json browser with collapsible sections, pretty printing and filtering.
(I think Firefox shows the json browser when the mimetype is set to json, and opening a local file with a .json extension is an easy way to set the mimetype.)
I stumbled upon this by chance. But since then, everytime I have a long JSON snippet to debug, I save it to a text file, give it a .json extension and open it with Firefox.
* * *
Okay, so installing Firefox just to browse JSON is probably overkill, but this is great for me since I already use it.
I’m glad Firefox is my main browser.