Working with JSON, CSV, and Data Formats (Without Losing Your Mind)

JSON Formatter: Make Messy JSON Readable

APIs return minified JSON. It's one long line of brackets and braces that scrolls sideways for eternity. Debugging this? Impossible. You need to see the structure.

A JSON formatter does two things: validates and beautifies. Validation tells you if your JSON is broken and where. Beautification adds indentation and line breaks so you can actually read the thing.

The Validation Problem

JSON is strict. Very strict. Missing one comma and the whole thing fails. But error messages are cryptic: "Unexpected token at position 847." Great. Which line is that?

A good formatter highlights the exact character causing problems. Not "somewhere around line 50," but "line 52, column 18—you're missing a closing brace."

CSV to JSON: Spreadsheets Meet APIs

Your marketing team lives in spreadsheets. Your app lives in JSON. These two worlds need to communicate. The conversion seems simple until you realize CSV has... quirks.

Delimiter Drama

CSV means "comma-separated values." Except when it doesn't. Some files use semicolons. Some use tabs (technically TSV). Some use pipes. The extension says .csv but the content disagrees.

Worse: what if your data contains commas? Then you need quotes around fields. What if it contains quotes? Escape them. What if regional settings expect decimal commas? Everything breaks.

Header Row Assumptions

Most CSV-to-JSON converters assume the first row contains column headers that become JSON property names. Usually correct. Sometimes not. Check your source data.

JSON to CSV: When Spreadsheets Win

Sometimes you need to go the other way. Your data lives in JSON but someone needs to analyze it in Excel. Or you're building a report for non-technical stakeholders who aren't going to learn what a bracket means.

The Nesting Problem

JSON can be nested. CSV can't. If your JSON has objects inside objects, the converter needs to flatten them. This usually means dot notation: user.address.citybecomes a column header.

Arrays are trickier. Does tags: ["red", "blue"] become one column with "red,blue" or two columns for tag[0] and tag[1]? Different converters handle this differently. Know your data structure.

XML and JSON: Legacy and Modern

XML was the standard before JSON took over. Banks, governments, and enterprise systems still speak XML. SOAP APIs, configuration files, and data feeds—XML is everywhere if you work with old systems.

From XML to JSON

Converting XML to JSON is straightforward for simple documents but tricky with attributes. In XML, <user id="123">Alice</user> has both an attribute and text content. JSON needs to represent this somehow—usually as {"user": {"@id": "123", "#text": "Alice"}}.

From JSON to XML

Going the other direction, you need to specify a root element (XML requires one) and decide how to handle arrays. Each element in the array usually becomes a repeated XML tag.

YAML and JSON: Config File Friends

Kubernetes, Docker Compose, GitHub Actions, Ansible—the DevOps world runs on YAML. It's cleaner than JSON for config files because it doesn't need quotes and brackets everywhere. But sometimes you need JSON for an API or programmatic manipulation.

YAML to JSON

YAML files convert cleanly to JSON. The main thing you lose is comments—JSON doesn't support them. If your YAML has crucial explanatory comments, document them somewhere else before converting.

JSON to YAML

Going to YAML, you gain readability. That sprawling JSON config becomes organized, indented, and human-editable. Just watch the indentation—YAML is whitespace-sensitive like Python.

Common Errors and How to Fix Them

Why Local Processing Matters for Data

Data conversions often involve sensitive information. Customer lists, financial records, configuration files with API keys—you don't want this uploaded to random servers.

Our tools process everything in your browser. The data stays on your device. Nothing is transmitted anywhere. You can verify this by watching the Network tab in browser dev tools—zero upload requests during conversion.