About the JSON Viewer
Reading a large JSON response as text is slow because your eye has to match brackets. The viewer parses the document and draws it as a tree: objects and arrays become expandable nodes showing how many keys or items they contain, and leaf values are coloured by type so strings, numbers, booleans and nulls are distinguishable at a glance.
The first two levels open by default, deeper levels open on click, and the browser remembers the state while you scroll. Because the tree is built from the parsed value, the viewer is also a validator: malformed input produces a line-and-column error instead of a half-drawn tree.
Typical uses are inspecting an API payload before writing code against it, finding which key holds the value you need in a deeply nested config, or checking the shape of a document exported from a database. Copy still works in this view: it copies the formatted JSON text rather than the tree markup, so you can paste it into an editor.
How to use
- Paste JSON on the left, or upload a file. The tree renders on the right.
- Click a node label to expand or collapse it. The count next to each node tells you how many children it has.
- Use Copy to copy the formatted JSON, or Download to save it.
Common questions
- Can the viewer open very large JSON files?
- Files up to a few megabytes render quickly. Above that, the number of DOM nodes becomes the limit; collapse deep branches rather than expanding everything.
- Does it show the JSONPath of a value?
- Not in the tree itself. The JSON Path Finder lists every path in the document so you can copy the one you need.
- Why are some keys shown in a different order than my file?
- They are not. Keys are rendered in the order they appear in the input. Only the JSON Sorter reorders keys.