14 ms·

JSON Hero: Enhanced JSON structure visualization

499 points by fagnerbrack 4y ago

xigoi 4y ago
Could the examples on the main page stop switching every second so I can actually lookat them?
dale_glass 4y ago
There's something badly wrong with your website. I left the tab open, and somehow it grew to suck up 40GB RAM. You should really fix that.
andy800 4y ago
If we're talking JSON document visualization, it's essential to point out this brilliant page: https://altearius.github.io/tools/json/index.html https://altearius.github.io/tools/json/index.html Was formerly hosted at http://chris.photobooks.com/json http://chris.photobooks.com/json
- aembleton 4y ago
  Fantastic, that is far more useful
randomdrake 4y ago
How far from WSDLs and SOAP we’ve come. I applaud this effort. I hate that we’re back to where this feels necessary. I’m not sure if there’s anything better. JSON sure felt better than XML. But did we abstract too far, or did we just get so much better bandwidth and processors, that enriched data exploration is just insignificantly possible? I read the use-cases for this, but I feel like: if you’ve gone so far to where this is helpful/useful, have you just gone too far?
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  > I read the use-cases for this, but I feel like: if you’ve gone so far to where this is helpful/useful, have you just gone too far? I don't understand this perspective. JSON isn't used only for RPC, even if that's what most frontend software is doing. For better or worse, it became a data serialization and interchange format - the need for such support tools arises naturally once you're generating or processing anything but most trivial data, and you value your time/sanity.
  - randomdrake 4y ago
    Totally fair. I guess I was mostly considering the more typical client-server consumption, RPC-type uses and wasn’t really thinking just how much we use it for basic data interchange and serialization. Thanks.
homero 4y ago
I love JSON but wish it had comments I guess I can just add an object
- klaushougesen1 4y ago
  JSON5
  - homero 4y ago
    Nice trailing commas too. Too bad it's not for machine to machine
kondro 4y ago
I like it, but don't love that it's a web app. I guess I could fork it myself, but don't particularly want to have to run a web app to browser JSON either. I wonder how easy it would be to port to Electron.
- sorenjan 4y ago
  They have a VS Code extension. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=JSONHero.jsonhero-vscode https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=JSONHero...
  - joeyjojo 4y ago
    It just opens your json in a publicly accessible page at https://jsonhero.io/ https://jsonhero.io/
- tfsh 4y ago
  Forking perfectly functional browser-based web app into Electron apps is an irritating trend with very limited benefits. Some apps exist as Electron apps because they require native OS access, this app does not, therefore there is no reason to do so. Porting to Electron would be trivial but in doing so you incur the following ramifications: - the user has yet another instance of Chromium running on their device. - they can't interact with browser based UIs easily any longer (bookmarking, retaining in history, copying the URL, different cookie/login jars, etc...). - might fragment the users workflow even more if they have to interleave between electron apps and their browser - lack of user extensions and some important accessibility features In Chrome you can create a shortcut for the page and select "open in a new window" which by-in-large emulates the workflow you request. I'm sure there's a similar process for Firefox.
  - cobertos 4y ago
    I think at least forking and hosting it yourself if a good middle ground between forking into an Electron app. Who wants a tool they rely on to one day update with spyware, HTTP 404, or filled with ads (like Toptal did with keycode.info)?
tfsh 4y ago
See also jsoncrack [1] which visualises JSON as n-ary tree data-structures. This project takes a different approach, in that it handles the displaying of JSON node leaf data in a more human way. E.g for hex colours showing a colour picker or a date picker for dates. What sets this tool apart however is the static analysis of the JSON data, which in doing so can uncover divergences or outliers in the data. E.g a single null value somewhere, or supposedly data which deviates from the majority data-type (i.e a number where every other value is a string). I think there's value proposition in just edge case detection. Datasets can be massive, with something like JSON there exists no formal type verification. Although to be honest, I don't see a valid reason to use JSON as a backend given graph based databases with type-safe schemas exist. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32626873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32626873
- rurban 4y ago
  jsoncrack cannot even open the simpliest of my json files (600K: too large), whilst this handled it easily.
  - vincnetas 4y ago
    what is the use case for having 600K (lines? bytes?) JSON? I'm a bit shocked and curious at the same time :)
    - pletnes 4y ago
      Data dumps and exports between systems. REST APIs, databases, that sort of thing. CSV is the most common utf8/ascii option.
    - TeMPOraL 4y ago
      'pletnes provided some use case classes. JSON is an ubiquitous data interchange format, so document sizes vary with data. I'll chime in with a real example I look at daily: the compilation database of a C++ project I work on, i.e. the compile_commands.json file. This file is fed to a language server (clangd) so it can correctly process the source code, and provide IDE features to text editors. The JSON file itself, as created by CMake, is some 2+ megabytes in size. Once run through `compdb` utility, which adds missing entries for header files, it grows to 25 megabytes.
stevage 4y ago
I'm not really clear on what the value-add is here. When is one needing to "visualise" JSON in this way, without editing it? Does it really help that much? Generally I just open in VS Code, reformat and use search etc.
- joeyjojo 4y ago
  I could see a tool like this being really useful on my web game projects, where I would like artists/animators making contributions.
- beardbandit 4y ago
  I can think of one valuable use-case: parsing through JSON responses for APIs with poor fields/response documentation -- especially if you have to parse through a ton of information. Still way more readable than XML.
  - dotancohen 4y ago
    > Still way more readable than XML. AJAX should have been just AJ.
  - aembleton 4y ago
    I think this is harder to parse than just having a well formatted structure in a text editor
- throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
  to make sense of API responses
  - brettermeier 4y ago
    Why you need this tool for that? I think I would need longer with it as without, comparing to a nice formatted text in an editor (or maybe even the Firefox developer tools, which also format JSON very well).
osbkca 4y ago
Nice! Should create extension for VsCode, Sublime Text ...
- eallam 4y ago
  We do have a VS Code extension: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=JSONHero.jsonhero-vscode https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=JSONHero...
  - manzu 4y ago
    can you make a jetbrains extension also, please?
alana314 4y ago
I just want JSON with comments. I don't want YAML.
- toastal 4y ago
  I want more Dhall. I want types for data structures and small functions for dealing with repetition.
- maxbond 4y ago
  Curious why YAML doesn't work for you?
  - bufferoverflow 4y ago
    JSON is natively supported by many languages. I don't know of any language that supports YAML without a 3rd party library.
    - maxbond 4y ago
      Hmm, for sure, personally I find it a very small price to pay for everything YAML offers, but I understand this is a matter of taste and judgement where reasonable people disagree, and that there are problem spaces/organizations where adopting dependencies is difficult/has a lot of red tape. Is it merely about the ecosystem? I'm curious if something about the language isn't meeting people's needs.
      - davebranton 4y ago
        YAML is much too complex. I am never able to remember all the different ways of formatting text, for instance, and have to resort to cheat-sheet guides such as this all the time. https://yaml-multiline.info/ https://yaml-multiline.info/ The YAML spec is thousands of lines long (23k words, to be more exact). This is even longer than XML (20k words). JSON's spec is less than two thousand words. For a language that's supposed to be human-readable, YAML is maddeningly complex. https://yaml.org/spec/1.2.2/ https://yaml.org/spec/1.2.2/ Plus, of course, you can execute arbitrary code with it. By design. AND it contains semantic whitespace, which is personally my least favourite innovation ever.
bsimpson 4y ago
Hahaha - I get this when opening it in an HN browser on my phone: TypeError: Cannot read properties of null (reading 'getItem') at u (https://jsonhero.io/build/_shared/chunk-LYGVB3WT.js:1:161) at https://jsonhero.io/build/_shared/chunk-LYGVB3WT.js:1:407 at Gf (https://jsonhero.io/build/_shared/chunk-PZ2Z7HGX.js:9:6560) at L.unstable_runWithPriority (https://jsonhero.io/build/_shared/chunk-PZ2Z7HGX.js:1:4026) at rn (https://jsonhero.io/build/_shared/chunk-PZ2Z7HGX.js:5:38448) at Xe (https://jsonhero.io/build/_shared/chunk-PZ2Z7HGX.js:9:6029) at yi (https://jsonhero.io/build/_shared/chunk-PZ2Z7HGX.js:7:10750) at https://jsonhero.io/build/_shared/chunk-PZ2Z7HGX.js:5:38670 at L.unstable_runWithPriority (https://jsonhero.io/build/_shared/chunk-PZ2Z7HGX.js:1:4026) at rn (https://jsonhero.io/build/_shared/chunk-PZ2Z7HGX.js:5:38448) Biggest SPA fail I think I've ever seen.
- franga2000 4y ago
  Same (WebView inside Materialistic). The worst part is everything loads correctly, then crashes. If I time it just right, I can press the stop loading button and read the page in its entirety (styled and everything). I've seen it happen once or twice before on near-identical landing pages (maybe one of them was a previous post of this). It truly amazes me that anyone in their right mind would even consider writing the code that does this. This isn't something that "just happens" - someone intentionally wrote code to replace the whole page with an error message (probably a developer of some JS framework this site uses) and that's simply not acceptable. Even if this is a debug build (it obviously shouldn't be, but who knows), this behavior is insane.
- eallam 4y ago
  We definitely need to get better with our error messages! Thanks for the report, we'll look into it! What phone OS are you on?
  - ayewo 4y ago
    I got a similar error when I first landed on your website from Firefox on macOS.
gcau 4y ago
Any VSCode extension which does this? Rather than a website
dotancohen 4y ago
I think that Emacs already provide all these features, other than the ability to email a portion of the JSON. Maybe Emacs doesn't support video previews, but it would not surprise me to find such a package.
user3939382 4y ago
I need a JSON schema editor for macOS. I found this: https://www.json-buddy.com/ https://www.json-buddy.com/ but it's Windows only and has what I call a "millions of tiny buttons" UI. JSON schema is awesome but it's really tedious to write by hand, even if the basic is auto-generated. It can also get really complex and thumbs up or down doesn't cut it for developer experience. I want something where I can debug/step through the validation.
- Existenceblinks 4y ago
  I think nobody writes JSON Schema by hand .. I see most of them use their lang libs to generate it. What language are you using?
  - user3939382 4y ago
    I agree. That's basically what I meant by, even when the base is auto-generated. In other words: you can generate a JSON schema from an example JSON. However, if you're using that to validate, say, an API response, the auto-generate tool can't possibly know what the valid range of values might be, or how some keys will shift depending on the request. Any type of variation like that requires hand-tuning. I use it in a variety of languages: JS/TS, PHP, Java.
    - Existenceblinks 4y ago
      I believe a programming language can be written to generate any requirement you have on json schemas. Have you tried https://www.npmjs.com/package/ts-json-schema-generator https://www.npmjs.com/package/ts-json-schema-generator and see what you can't do? I built a json schema editor gui saas, and my conclusion is no one is buying because they use lang libs to generate it. So I kinda surprise you said you wanted an editor.
      - user3939382 4y ago
        For my use case that doesn't really help at all. So I'm doing request/response in JSON with a third-party API and I want to programmatically detect if their response is valid, not based on any rules the API can know, but based on the context of my integration. So I use JSON schema to define what valid responses (for my particular application/integration) look like. How I do this now, is to get an example response, auto-generate the schema using a tool like this https://extendsclass.com/json-schema-validator.html https://extendsclass.com/json-schema-validator.html and then hand-tune from there. In some cases the same endpoint response can have huge variations depending on the request so it's very tedious doing this by hand. A variation on the tool above that would help a lot would be if I could provide multiple example JSONs and it could return a schema that validates all of them. JSON schema is used in MySQL now natively, it's used in PHP, and from what I can tell a lot of other languages. The package you linked to assumes you're generating it from JS/TS. As JSON becomes even more popular as a data interchange format I think that assumption will be less true. This is just a complete guess, but maybe your tool wasn't getting traction just because it's so early in the life of JSON Schema. There's not even a final stable version 1 yet.
otabdeveloper4 4y ago
I couldn't figure out how to use this thing. (And I work with JSON for a living.)
einichi 4y ago
My number one requirement for a tool like this is that the JSON content never leaves the machine it's on. I can only imagine the kind of personal information or proprietary internal data that has been unwittingly transmitted due to tools like this. If my objective was to gain the secrets of various worldwide entities, one of the first things I would do is set up seemingly innocent Pastebins, JSON checkers, online file format convertors and permanently retain all submitted data.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Mogzol 4y ago
  Completely agree. I could actually get a lot of use out of a tool like this, but the fact that even the VSCode extension sends the JSON to their servers and opens it at a publicly accessible URL makes this a no-go for me. I wouldn't recommend anyone use this for any remotely sensitive data.
  - chii 4y ago
    the extension apparently can be configured to use a locally running instance of the server. But yes, by default it uses the remote version, and thus you post publicly the json, which may or may not be ideal depending on what you're doing.
    - Mogzol 4y ago
      The fact that it needs a server at all seems unnecessary. It's all written in JavaScript, and isn't doing anything that couldn't be done in a browser, I see no reason why this can't be an entirely client-side application.
      - mholt 4y ago
        Processing multi-GB files in the browser is... fun. Doing that kind of thing on a server is easier. *I'm not justifying doing it on the server, especially for an application like this where yes: it can be done in the client.* But I do sympathize because I know from experience why it's easier to do it server-side, without any conspiracies. I wrote Papa Parse[0] about 10 years ago, and back then at least, it was extremely difficult to stream large files in an efficient, reliable way. Web Workers make things slightly better, but there's so many issues with large-scale local compute in a browser tab. A few examples: - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24708649/why-does-web-worker-performance-sharply-decline-after-30-seconds https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24708649/why-does-web-wo... (the answer actually came from Google+ which is still linked to, but no longer available; fortunately I summarized it in my post) - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27081858/how-can-i-make-a-really-long-string-using-indexeddb-without-crashing-the-browser https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27081858/how-can-i-make-... You get deep enough into the weeds and eventually you realize you can make it work cross-browser if you know which browser you're using (YES, User-Agent does matter for things like this) and call you crazy for trying to find out: - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27084036/how-can-i-reliably-detect-the-browser-without-using-window-navigator https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27084036/how-can-i-relia... Despite all this, I *100%* agree and local-only processing is also a hard-rule for me as well. (That's why JSON-to-Go[1] does it all client-side. `go fmt` event compiles to WASM and runs in the browser!) [0]: https://www.papaparse.com/ https://www.papaparse.com/ [1]: https://mholt.github.io/json-to-go/ https://mholt.github.io/json-to-go/
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
marsven_422 4y ago
benatkin 4y ago
I'm not offended, but I'm also not gonna use something that says JSON sucks.
irrational 4y ago
The first thing I see when I go to the site: JSON SUCKS Uh... It does? I remember when XML was the main data interchange format of the web. That sucked. JSON is amazing, terrific, wonderful, etc. in comparison.
- stevoski 4y ago
  Indeed. I’m (sorta) old and cranky and even I love JSON as a data interchange format. Because I had to use XML for years, including SOAP.
- 998244353 4y ago
  It's always strange to think that we went through formats like XML (and even earlier, XDR) before inventing something as seemingly simple and obvious as JSON.
  - eru 4y ago
    We had S-Expressions before we had JSON. (And JavaScript originally wanted to be a Lisp, too.) It's not that we had XML and SGML and XDR because nobody had invented something as simple as JSON, yet. The real reasons are some complicated social hodgepodge that made those complicated beasts more accepted than the already-invented simpler approaches.
  - s3000 4y ago
    Why does React use JSX when it could be all JavaScript and JSON? My guess is that XML is good for situations where text and data is mixed.
    - kaoD 4y ago
      Named closing tags are good when manually writing stuff because it reduces the opportunity for errors.
      - alpaca128 4y ago
        What advantage does that have compared to simple bracket highlighting and indentation? Editors can easily highlight mismatched parentheses, they are however rarely smart enough to auto-close XML tag pairs. I just see it as unnecessary clutter. Meanwhile the only issue I have with JSON is the lack of support for trailing commas.
ergocoder 4y ago
I'll never paste a json from my work machine on a website... It is a security risk.
mvindahl 4y ago
Tried it out on some REST response from a local test server. And, well, as much as I applaud the effort, I also think that I'll stick to my text editor for browsing JSON data and to jq for extracting data from it. My text editor because it's easy to perfom free text search and to fold sections, and that's all that I need to get an overview. Jq because it's such a brilliantly sharp knife for carving out the exact data that out want. Say I had to iterate a JSON array of company departments, each with a nested array of employees, and collect everyone's email. A navigational tool doesn't help a whole lot but it's a jq one liner. Jq scales to large data structures in a way that no navigational tool would ever do. Also, there is the security issue of pasting potentially sensitive data into a website.
- alin23 4y ago
  Also check out jqp (jq REPL) for when you need a few tries to get the right jq selector: https://github.com/noahgorstein/jqp https://github.com/noahgorstein/jqp Looks a bit like fzf combined with jq.
Thorentis 4y ago
> JSON Sucks Does it though? I'm not a huge fan of tools who bash the thing they're trying to help people work with. Maybe "JSON is hard" is a better tag line?
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  But it isn't. It's dumb, it's annoying, it's overused, but it's not hard.
  - brettermeier 4y ago
    And you prefer YAML, or which one isn't "dumb, annoying and overused"? I would pick JSON over many such formats. And no tools needed.
    - TeMPOraL 4y ago
      I prefer s-expressions, but that's a matter of taste :). By "dumb", I mean it's simple - almost as simple as it gets. I don't like YAML - it's more complicated than JSON in all the bad ways[0]. By "annoying" I mean the experience of using it in languages other than JavaScript, especially in statically-typed ones. I guess it's true for all such data formats - XML, YAML and s-exps are also going to create the same kind of type-related pain. By "overused" I mean, it's used too often in places where it shouldn't be[1], adding to software inefficiency and bloat at every layer. But my point is, none of that is actually hard. It's just stupid, annoying drudgework. ---- [0] - Optimizing too much for looking "nice" to humans, by means of removing affordances that make the precise structure obvious. It's particularly apparent when you try to write some, and the document grows beyond screenful of lines in length, and 2-3 levels in depth. [1] - There are many, many examples of JSON being used where a more streamlined text format, or a binary format, would be a better fit. One that comes to my mind and annoys me to no end, is when people encode large amounts of time series data in JSON, in a format like [{"x" : "123", "y" : "456"}, ...]. The data set becomes easily 10x the size it should be, 20-30x if it's not minified. Sure computers are fast and all, but I've long suspected - and recently seen some articles confirming - that at this point, software is often no longer IO-bound, but CPU-bound, and mostly on parsers.
lizardactivist 4y ago
I'm not sure about the way-over-the-top name of the product, but it does look useful. Also, how much data is collected, and can people trust pasting in sensitive stuff there?
cccccchh 4y ago
Hi
cccccchh 4y ago
Huh
ranting-moth 4y ago
Also, in case you're working in Typescript with a massive JSON and no types: https://quicktype.io/typescript https://quicktype.io/typescript It generates TS type file from a raw JSON file. Has totally saved my sanity at least once.
aembleton 4y ago
If anyone wants to try it out, but doesn't want to send them your Json, here's an example of some real world data https://jsonhero.io/j/t0Vp6NafO2p2 https://jsonhero.io/j/t0Vp6NafO2p2 For me, this is harder to use than reading the JSON in a colour text editor such as VSCode. I'm getting less information on the page, and its harder to scan, but that might be because I'm used to reading JSON.
- lampe3 4y ago
  Thanks for the link! And yes I feel the same. For me its also easier to read it either on raw form or in VsCode.
- S0und 4y ago
  few more: https://github.com/jdorfman/awesome-json-datasets https://github.com/jdorfman/awesome-json-datasets
- _____-___ 4y ago
  Yeah, it looks cool, but anything I'd use it for I'd use jq for and much, much faster.
dewey 4y ago
It looks like it's open source and you can run it locally if you don't trust a third party website (and you probably shouldn't, depending on the data you paste in there): https://github.com/apihero-run/jsonhero-web https://github.com/apihero-run/jsonhero-web
osrec 4y ago
As far as I'm concerned, JSON doesn't suck! For all its shortcomings, I still find it clear and easy to read, and when gzipped, it compresses reasonably well over the wire, especially when you have a bunch of repeated property names in arrays etc. Nice tool, but like others have said, I'm pretty comfortable reading JSON in my editor.
- chopin 4y ago
  If JSON had comments, I'd be fine with it.
  - DataOverload 4y ago
Timpy 4y ago
I get a lot of useful information from reading raw URLs, the exact thing they're advertising here is the thing I hate most about Jira. I even wrote a chrome extension that prevents Jira from loading smart links because I hate it so much. I can't imagine ever wanting a YouTube video preview while I'm skimming JSON data.
douglee650 4y ago
JSON is actually a really good format, I disagree with their premise "JSON sucks". Like, sure it's got some use cases it doesn't handle well, but overall there's a reason it won.
- ilyt 4y ago
  The reason it won is "most popular(and only) web language used it". I'm not saying it's bad, I'm saying it didn't won on technical merits. I do dislike people using them for configs tho, even indented the readability is just "okay", the ease of change is worse than YAML (even with all it's problem), especially forcing no trailing `,` is just plainly obnoxious.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  The lack of ability to concretely define data structures is a huge pain, both when using it and when writing libraries to process it. You can throw JsonSchema at it, but now you have two problems. Can't use comments to try to work around that deficiency, even just to communicate intent to someone looking at an example record, at least not in vanilla json. Record streaming—basically necessary at anything resembling "scale", if you don't want to kill performance—is a non-standard afterthought in most of the ecosystem. It wastes my time and tends, in practice, to cause bugs, all for no good reason. I'd say "sucks" is accurate. Not that it's the only bad format we've come up with lately (YAML, ugh).
  - user3939382 4y ago
    I use JSON Schema written in JSON5. That at least fixes the commenting problem.
baxuz 4y ago
Would be great if this could be used as a web component for debugging purposes.
shanipribadi 4y ago
it still has the javascript limitation of ieee float for json numeric (hence rounding once you have bigger than 2^53) :-(
enriquto 4y ago
> JSON sucks. But we're making it better. Why would you make something better at sucking? Just gron the damn thing and grep through it like a normal person.
franciscop 4y ago
I've been frustrated with JSON when mixing text data and content due to the default prettier/JSON.stringify/browser format, which makes it very vertical, specially when mixing in 2d/3d data/arrays. I found a simple solution was to use json-beautify[1] before printing/saving data in files. Suddenly my 2000+ lines of scroll-fast JSON became 200-300 lines of highly legible data. [1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/json-beautify https://www.npmjs.com/package/json-beautify
nodomain 4y ago
Totally unclear after first glance on the site: what does it cost, what is your monetization strategy? Is it open source, for free? Please make this clearer.
mainedotpy 4y ago
Tried to use this with large (650+mb) FDA drug label JSON [0] and it does not work, offers no error message etc. Bummer. 0: https://open.fda.gov/apis/drug/label/download/ https://open.fda.gov/apis/drug/label/download/
massung 4y ago
For those looking for the ability to (locally) open and query very large JSON files, Dadroit is great: https://dadroit.com https://dadroit.com. It's been a while since I used it last, but it was a life saver for me when working with JSON lines files in S3 and Kafka log dumps. A side tidbit, IIRC, it was written in Pascal.
julianlam 4y ago
It's almost 2023, are people still looking at unformatted JSON strings in their browser? Firefox even ships with a JSON viewer enabled by default.
jordanmorgan10 4y ago
"JSON Sucks". It really doesn't though.
- ilyt 4y ago
  Not as readable as YAML/TOML. Vastly less if unindented. More annoying to write than YAML/TOML, no trailing comma. Yes I'd rank it lower than YAML even with its whitespace annoyances, good editor handle that, JSON is still annoying. Not super compact (althought it's not too bad when compressed). No proper numeric types, just one "sorta int, sorta float, depends on parser, say farewell to NaNs and infinities", you can't even losslessly transfer a normal IEEE flaot across it. The schema thing came late so rarely used or supported. So it really is pretty mediocre all things considered. Definitely "good enough" but could also be improved.
  - jordanmorgan10 4y ago
    "Good enough" is realistic in my opinion.
olwmc 4y ago
Tangentially related, I love this website: https://vanya.jp.net/vtree/ https://vanya.jp.net/vtree/. My first interpreter had a flag -j that output the AST as JSON so that I could see it on this site.
itslennysfault 4y ago
> JSON sucks I don't understand this sentiment at all. Not even sure why we need this tool. Feels like a solution looking for a problem to me. Personally, the built-in JSON parsing/formatting in VS Code (or any other editor) is plenty for me, and for API results Firefox will automatically format / collapse it. Eg... open this link in Firefox: https://www.reddit.com/r/funny.json https://www.reddit.com/r/funny.json
thih9 4y ago
> JSON Hero only works on desktop (For now!) That’s unfortunate! I like that the landing page provides clear examples, but still, I’d prefer a full featured live demo.
insane_dreamer 4y ago
Super nice, but never going to paste/send my JSON to some web app for security reasons. Glad to see it can be run locally; might set it up on a local server.
plusminusplus 4y ago
It would be great to combine this with type annotations somehow (JSONC?) and have the UI nag you when a value doesn't match its expected type (nice demo, thanks for sharing)
DataOverload 4y ago
sieabahlpark 4y ago
redanddead 4y ago
Way better than most visualizers. Seems like an engineer built it.

499 points by fagnerbrack 4y ago

Could the examples on the main page stop switching every second so I can actually lookat them?

There's something badly wrong with your website. I left the tab open, and somehow it grew to suck up 40GB RAM. You should really fix that.

andy800 4y ago

If we're talking JSON document visualization, it's essential to point out this brilliant page: https://altearius.github.io/tools/json/index.html https://altearius.github.io/tools/json/index.html Was formerly hosted at http://chris.photobooks.com/json http://chris.photobooks.com/json

aembleton 4y ago
Fantastic, that is far more useful

randomdrake 4y ago

How far from WSDLs and SOAP we’ve come. I applaud this effort. I hate that we’re back to where this feels necessary. I’m not sure if there’s anything better. JSON sure felt better than XML. But did we abstract too far, or did we just get so much better bandwidth and processors, that enriched data exploration is just insignificantly possible? I read the use-cases for this, but I feel like: if you’ve gone so far to where this is helpful/useful, have you just gone too far?

TeMPOraL 4y ago
> I read the use-cases for this, but I feel like: if you’ve gone so far to where this is helpful/useful, have you just gone too far? I don't understand this perspective. JSON isn't used only for RPC, even if that's what most frontend software is doing. For better or worse, it became a data serialization and interchange format - the need for such support tools arises naturally once you're generating or processing anything but most trivial data, and you value your time/sanity.
- randomdrake 4y ago
  Totally fair. I guess I was mostly considering the more typical client-server consumption, RPC-type uses and wasn’t really thinking just how much we use it for basic data interchange and serialization. Thanks.

homero 4y ago

I love JSON but wish it had comments I guess I can just add an object

klaushougesen1 4y ago
JSON5
- homero 4y ago
  Nice trailing commas too. Too bad it's not for machine to machine

kondro 4y ago

I like it, but don't love that it's a web app. I guess I could fork it myself, but don't particularly want to have to run a web app to browser JSON either. I wonder how easy it would be to port to Electron.

sorenjan 4y ago
They have a VS Code extension. https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=JSONHero.jsonhero-vscode https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=JSONHero...
- joeyjojo 4y ago
  It just opens your json in a publicly accessible page at https://jsonhero.io/ https://jsonhero.io/
tfsh 4y ago
Forking perfectly functional browser-based web app into Electron apps is an irritating trend with very limited benefits. Some apps exist as Electron apps because they require native OS access, this app does not, therefore there is no reason to do so. Porting to Electron would be trivial but in doing so you incur the following ramifications: - the user has yet another instance of Chromium running on their device. - they can't interact with browser based UIs easily any longer (bookmarking, retaining in history, copying the URL, different cookie/login jars, etc...). - might fragment the users workflow even more if they have to interleave between electron apps and their browser - lack of user extensions and some important accessibility features In Chrome you can create a shortcut for the page and select "open in a new window" which by-in-large emulates the workflow you request. I'm sure there's a similar process for Firefox.
- cobertos 4y ago
  I think at least forking and hosting it yourself if a good middle ground between forking into an Electron app. Who wants a tool they rely on to one day update with spyware, HTTP 404, or filled with ads (like Toptal did with keycode.info)?

tfsh 4y ago

See also jsoncrack [1] which visualises JSON as n-ary tree data-structures. This project takes a different approach, in that it handles the displaying of JSON node leaf data in a more human way. E.g for hex colours showing a colour picker or a date picker for dates. What sets this tool apart however is the static analysis of the JSON data, which in doing so can uncover divergences or outliers in the data. E.g a single null value somewhere, or supposedly data which deviates from the majority data-type (i.e a number where every other value is a string). I think there's value proposition in just edge case detection. Datasets can be massive, with something like JSON there exists no formal type verification. Although to be honest, I don't see a valid reason to use JSON as a backend given graph based databases with type-safe schemas exist. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32626873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32626873

rurban 4y ago
jsoncrack cannot even open the simpliest of my json files (600K: too large), whilst this handled it easily.
- vincnetas 4y ago
  what is the use case for having 600K (lines? bytes?) JSON? I'm a bit shocked and curious at the same time :)
  - pletnes 4y ago
    Data dumps and exports between systems. REST APIs, databases, that sort of thing. CSV is the most common utf8/ascii option.
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    'pletnes provided some use case classes. JSON is an ubiquitous data interchange format, so document sizes vary with data. I'll chime in with a real example I look at daily: the compilation database of a C++ project I work on, i.e. the compile_commands.json file. This file is fed to a language server (clangd) so it can correctly process the source code, and provide IDE features to text editors. The JSON file itself, as created by CMake, is some 2+ megabytes in size. Once run through `compdb` utility, which adds missing entries for header files, it grows to 25 megabytes.

stevage 4y ago

I'm not really clear on what the value-add is here. When is one needing to "visualise" JSON in this way, without editing it? Does it really help that much? Generally I just open in VS Code, reformat and use search etc.

joeyjojo 4y ago
I could see a tool like this being really useful on my web game projects, where I would like artists/animators making contributions.
beardbandit 4y ago
I can think of one valuable use-case: parsing through JSON responses for APIs with poor fields/response documentation -- especially if you have to parse through a ton of information. Still way more readable than XML.
- dotancohen 4y ago
  > Still way more readable than XML. AJAX should have been just AJ.
- aembleton 4y ago
  I think this is harder to parse than just having a well formatted structure in a text editor
throwaway0x7E6 4y ago
to make sense of API responses
- brettermeier 4y ago
  Why you need this tool for that? I think I would need longer with it as without, comparing to a nice formatted text in an editor (or maybe even the Firefox developer tools, which also format JSON very well).

osbkca 4y ago

Nice! Should create extension for VsCode, Sublime Text ...

eallam 4y ago
We do have a VS Code extension: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=JSONHero.jsonhero-vscode https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=JSONHero...
- manzu 4y ago
  can you make a jetbrains extension also, please?

alana314 4y ago

I just want JSON with comments. I don't want YAML.

toastal 4y ago
I want more Dhall. I want types for data structures and small functions for dealing with repetition.
maxbond 4y ago
Curious why YAML doesn't work for you?
- bufferoverflow 4y ago
  JSON is natively supported by many languages. I don't know of any language that supports YAML without a 3rd party library.
  - maxbond 4y ago
    Hmm, for sure, personally I find it a very small price to pay for everything YAML offers, but I understand this is a matter of taste and judgement where reasonable people disagree, and that there are problem spaces/organizations where adopting dependencies is difficult/has a lot of red tape. Is it merely about the ecosystem? I'm curious if something about the language isn't meeting people's needs.
    - davebranton 4y ago
      YAML is much too complex. I am never able to remember all the different ways of formatting text, for instance, and have to resort to cheat-sheet guides such as this all the time. https://yaml-multiline.info/ https://yaml-multiline.info/ The YAML spec is thousands of lines long (23k words, to be more exact). This is even longer than XML (20k words). JSON's spec is less than two thousand words. For a language that's supposed to be human-readable, YAML is maddeningly complex. https://yaml.org/spec/1.2.2/ https://yaml.org/spec/1.2.2/ Plus, of course, you can execute arbitrary code with it. By design. AND it contains semantic whitespace, which is personally my least favourite innovation ever.

bsimpson 4y ago

Hahaha - I get this when opening it in an HN browser on my phone: TypeError: Cannot read properties of null (reading 'getItem') at u (https://jsonhero.io/build/_shared/chunk-LYGVB3WT.js:1:161) at https://jsonhero.io/build/_shared/chunk-LYGVB3WT.js:1:407 at Gf (https://jsonhero.io/build/_shared/chunk-PZ2Z7HGX.js:9:6560) at L.unstable_runWithPriority (https://jsonhero.io/build/_shared/chunk-PZ2Z7HGX.js:1:4026) at rn (https://jsonhero.io/build/_shared/chunk-PZ2Z7HGX.js:5:38448) at Xe (https://jsonhero.io/build/_shared/chunk-PZ2Z7HGX.js:9:6029) at yi (https://jsonhero.io/build/_shared/chunk-PZ2Z7HGX.js:7:10750) at https://jsonhero.io/build/_shared/chunk-PZ2Z7HGX.js:5:38670 at L.unstable_runWithPriority (https://jsonhero.io/build/_shared/chunk-PZ2Z7HGX.js:1:4026) at rn (https://jsonhero.io/build/_shared/chunk-PZ2Z7HGX.js:5:38448) Biggest SPA fail I think I've ever seen.

franga2000 4y ago
Same (WebView inside Materialistic). The worst part is everything loads correctly, then crashes. If I time it just right, I can press the stop loading button and read the page in its entirety (styled and everything). I've seen it happen once or twice before on near-identical landing pages (maybe one of them was a previous post of this). It truly amazes me that anyone in their right mind would even consider writing the code that does this. This isn't something that "just happens" - someone intentionally wrote code to replace the whole page with an error message (probably a developer of some JS framework this site uses) and that's simply not acceptable. Even if this is a debug build (it obviously shouldn't be, but who knows), this behavior is insane.
eallam 4y ago
We definitely need to get better with our error messages! Thanks for the report, we'll look into it! What phone OS are you on?
- ayewo 4y ago
  I got a similar error when I first landed on your website from Firefox on macOS.

gcau 4y ago

Any VSCode extension which does this? Rather than a website

dotancohen 4y ago

I think that Emacs already provide all these features, other than the ability to email a portion of the JSON. Maybe Emacs doesn't support video previews, but it would not surprise me to find such a package.

user3939382 4y ago

I need a JSON schema editor for macOS. I found this: https://www.json-buddy.com/ https://www.json-buddy.com/ but it's Windows only and has what I call a "millions of tiny buttons" UI. JSON schema is awesome but it's really tedious to write by hand, even if the basic is auto-generated. It can also get really complex and thumbs up or down doesn't cut it for developer experience. I want something where I can debug/step through the validation.

Existenceblinks 4y ago
I think nobody writes JSON Schema by hand .. I see most of them use their lang libs to generate it. What language are you using?
- user3939382 4y ago
  I agree. That's basically what I meant by, even when the base is auto-generated. In other words: you can generate a JSON schema from an example JSON. However, if you're using that to validate, say, an API response, the auto-generate tool can't possibly know what the valid range of values might be, or how some keys will shift depending on the request. Any type of variation like that requires hand-tuning. I use it in a variety of languages: JS/TS, PHP, Java.
  - Existenceblinks 4y ago
    I believe a programming language can be written to generate any requirement you have on json schemas. Have you tried https://www.npmjs.com/package/ts-json-schema-generator https://www.npmjs.com/package/ts-json-schema-generator and see what you can't do? I built a json schema editor gui saas, and my conclusion is no one is buying because they use lang libs to generate it. So I kinda surprise you said you wanted an editor.
    - user3939382 4y ago
      For my use case that doesn't really help at all. So I'm doing request/response in JSON with a third-party API and I want to programmatically detect if their response is valid, not based on any rules the API can know, but based on the context of my integration. So I use JSON schema to define what valid responses (for my particular application/integration) look like. How I do this now, is to get an example response, auto-generate the schema using a tool like this https://extendsclass.com/json-schema-validator.html https://extendsclass.com/json-schema-validator.html and then hand-tune from there. In some cases the same endpoint response can have huge variations depending on the request so it's very tedious doing this by hand. A variation on the tool above that would help a lot would be if I could provide multiple example JSONs and it could return a schema that validates all of them. JSON schema is used in MySQL now natively, it's used in PHP, and from what I can tell a lot of other languages. The package you linked to assumes you're generating it from JS/TS. As JSON becomes even more popular as a data interchange format I think that assumption will be less true. This is just a complete guess, but maybe your tool wasn't getting traction just because it's so early in the life of JSON Schema. There's not even a final stable version 1 yet.

otabdeveloper4 4y ago

I couldn't figure out how to use this thing. (And I work with JSON for a living.)

einichi 4y ago

My number one requirement for a tool like this is that the JSON content never leaves the machine it's on. I can only imagine the kind of personal information or proprietary internal data that has been unwittingly transmitted due to tools like this. If my objective was to gain the secrets of various worldwide entities, one of the first things I would do is set up seemingly innocent Pastebins, JSON checkers, online file format convertors and permanently retain all submitted data.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Mogzol 4y ago
Completely agree. I could actually get a lot of use out of a tool like this, but the fact that even the VSCode extension sends the JSON to their servers and opens it at a publicly accessible URL makes this a no-go for me. I wouldn't recommend anyone use this for any remotely sensitive data.
- chii 4y ago
  the extension apparently can be configured to use a locally running instance of the server. But yes, by default it uses the remote version, and thus you post publicly the json, which may or may not be ideal depending on what you're doing.
  - Mogzol 4y ago
    The fact that it needs a server at all seems unnecessary. It's all written in JavaScript, and isn't doing anything that couldn't be done in a browser, I see no reason why this can't be an entirely client-side application.
    - mholt 4y ago
      Processing multi-GB files in the browser is... fun. Doing that kind of thing on a server is easier. *I'm not justifying doing it on the server, especially for an application like this where yes: it can be done in the client.* But I do sympathize because I know from experience why it's easier to do it server-side, without any conspiracies. I wrote Papa Parse[0] about 10 years ago, and back then at least, it was extremely difficult to stream large files in an efficient, reliable way. Web Workers make things slightly better, but there's so many issues with large-scale local compute in a browser tab. A few examples: - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24708649/why-does-web-worker-performance-sharply-decline-after-30-seconds https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24708649/why-does-web-wo... (the answer actually came from Google+ which is still linked to, but no longer available; fortunately I summarized it in my post) - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27081858/how-can-i-make-a-really-long-string-using-indexeddb-without-crashing-the-browser https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27081858/how-can-i-make-... You get deep enough into the weeds and eventually you realize you can make it work cross-browser if you know which browser you're using (YES, User-Agent does matter for things like this) and call you crazy for trying to find out: - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27084036/how-can-i-reliably-detect-the-browser-without-using-window-navigator https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27084036/how-can-i-relia... Despite all this, I *100%* agree and local-only processing is also a hard-rule for me as well. (That's why JSON-to-Go[1] does it all client-side. `go fmt` event compiles to WASM and runs in the browser!) [0]: https://www.papaparse.com/ https://www.papaparse.com/ [1]: https://mholt.github.io/json-to-go/ https://mholt.github.io/json-to-go/

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

marsven_422 4y ago

benatkin 4y ago

I'm not offended, but I'm also not gonna use something that says JSON sucks.

irrational 4y ago

The first thing I see when I go to the site: JSON SUCKS Uh... It does? I remember when XML was the main data interchange format of the web. That sucked. JSON is amazing, terrific, wonderful, etc. in comparison.

stevoski 4y ago
Indeed. I’m (sorta) old and cranky and even I love JSON as a data interchange format. Because I had to use XML for years, including SOAP.
998244353 4y ago
It's always strange to think that we went through formats like XML (and even earlier, XDR) before inventing something as seemingly simple and obvious as JSON.
- eru 4y ago
  We had S-Expressions before we had JSON. (And JavaScript originally wanted to be a Lisp, too.) It's not that we had XML and SGML and XDR because nobody had invented something as simple as JSON, yet. The real reasons are some complicated social hodgepodge that made those complicated beasts more accepted than the already-invented simpler approaches.
- s3000 4y ago
  Why does React use JSX when it could be all JavaScript and JSON? My guess is that XML is good for situations where text and data is mixed.
  - kaoD 4y ago
    Named closing tags are good when manually writing stuff because it reduces the opportunity for errors.
    - alpaca128 4y ago
      What advantage does that have compared to simple bracket highlighting and indentation? Editors can easily highlight mismatched parentheses, they are however rarely smart enough to auto-close XML tag pairs. I just see it as unnecessary clutter. Meanwhile the only issue I have with JSON is the lack of support for trailing commas.

ergocoder 4y ago

I'll never paste a json from my work machine on a website... It is a security risk.

mvindahl 4y ago

Tried it out on some REST response from a local test server. And, well, as much as I applaud the effort, I also think that I'll stick to my text editor for browsing JSON data and to jq for extracting data from it. My text editor because it's easy to perfom free text search and to fold sections, and that's all that I need to get an overview. Jq because it's such a brilliantly sharp knife for carving out the exact data that out want. Say I had to iterate a JSON array of company departments, each with a nested array of employees, and collect everyone's email. A navigational tool doesn't help a whole lot but it's a jq one liner. Jq scales to large data structures in a way that no navigational tool would ever do. Also, there is the security issue of pasting potentially sensitive data into a website.

alin23 4y ago
Also check out jqp (jq REPL) for when you need a few tries to get the right jq selector: https://github.com/noahgorstein/jqp https://github.com/noahgorstein/jqp Looks a bit like fzf combined with jq.

Thorentis 4y ago

> JSON Sucks Does it though? I'm not a huge fan of tools who bash the thing they're trying to help people work with. Maybe "JSON is hard" is a better tag line?

TeMPOraL 4y ago
But it isn't. It's dumb, it's annoying, it's overused, but it's not hard.
- brettermeier 4y ago
  And you prefer YAML, or which one isn't "dumb, annoying and overused"? I would pick JSON over many such formats. And no tools needed.
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    I prefer s-expressions, but that's a matter of taste :). By "dumb", I mean it's simple - almost as simple as it gets. I don't like YAML - it's more complicated than JSON in all the bad ways[0]. By "annoying" I mean the experience of using it in languages other than JavaScript, especially in statically-typed ones. I guess it's true for all such data formats - XML, YAML and s-exps are also going to create the same kind of type-related pain. By "overused" I mean, it's used too often in places where it shouldn't be[1], adding to software inefficiency and bloat at every layer. But my point is, none of that is actually hard. It's just stupid, annoying drudgework. ---- [0] - Optimizing too much for looking "nice" to humans, by means of removing affordances that make the precise structure obvious. It's particularly apparent when you try to write some, and the document grows beyond screenful of lines in length, and 2-3 levels in depth. [1] - There are many, many examples of JSON being used where a more streamlined text format, or a binary format, would be a better fit. One that comes to my mind and annoys me to no end, is when people encode large amounts of time series data in JSON, in a format like [{"x" : "123", "y" : "456"}, ...]. The data set becomes easily 10x the size it should be, 20-30x if it's not minified. Sure computers are fast and all, but I've long suspected - and recently seen some articles confirming - that at this point, software is often no longer IO-bound, but CPU-bound, and mostly on parsers.

lizardactivist 4y ago

I'm not sure about the way-over-the-top name of the product, but it does look useful. Also, how much data is collected, and can people trust pasting in sensitive stuff there?

cccccchh 4y ago

Huh

ranting-moth 4y ago

Also, in case you're working in Typescript with a massive JSON and no types: https://quicktype.io/typescript https://quicktype.io/typescript It generates TS type file from a raw JSON file. Has totally saved my sanity at least once.

aembleton 4y ago

If anyone wants to try it out, but doesn't want to send them your Json, here's an example of some real world data https://jsonhero.io/j/t0Vp6NafO2p2 https://jsonhero.io/j/t0Vp6NafO2p2 For me, this is harder to use than reading the JSON in a colour text editor such as VSCode. I'm getting less information on the page, and its harder to scan, but that might be because I'm used to reading JSON.

lampe3 4y ago
Thanks for the link! And yes I feel the same. For me its also easier to read it either on raw form or in VsCode.
S0und 4y ago
few more: https://github.com/jdorfman/awesome-json-datasets https://github.com/jdorfman/awesome-json-datasets
_____-___ 4y ago
Yeah, it looks cool, but anything I'd use it for I'd use jq for and much, much faster.

dewey 4y ago

It looks like it's open source and you can run it locally if you don't trust a third party website (and you probably shouldn't, depending on the data you paste in there): https://github.com/apihero-run/jsonhero-web https://github.com/apihero-run/jsonhero-web

osrec 4y ago

As far as I'm concerned, JSON doesn't suck! For all its shortcomings, I still find it clear and easy to read, and when gzipped, it compresses reasonably well over the wire, especially when you have a bunch of repeated property names in arrays etc. Nice tool, but like others have said, I'm pretty comfortable reading JSON in my editor.

chopin 4y ago
If JSON had comments, I'd be fine with it.
- DataOverload 4y ago

Timpy 4y ago

I get a lot of useful information from reading raw URLs, the exact thing they're advertising here is the thing I hate most about Jira. I even wrote a chrome extension that prevents Jira from loading smart links because I hate it so much. I can't imagine ever wanting a YouTube video preview while I'm skimming JSON data.

douglee650 4y ago

JSON is actually a really good format, I disagree with their premise "JSON sucks". Like, sure it's got some use cases it doesn't handle well, but overall there's a reason it won.

ilyt 4y ago
The reason it won is "most popular(and only) web language used it". I'm not saying it's bad, I'm saying it didn't won on technical merits. I do dislike people using them for configs tho, even indented the readability is just "okay", the ease of change is worse than YAML (even with all it's problem), especially forcing no trailing `,` is just plainly obnoxious.
yamtaddle 4y ago
The lack of ability to concretely define data structures is a huge pain, both when using it and when writing libraries to process it. You can throw JsonSchema at it, but now you have two problems. Can't use comments to try to work around that deficiency, even just to communicate intent to someone looking at an example record, at least not in vanilla json. Record streaming—basically necessary at anything resembling "scale", if you don't want to kill performance—is a non-standard afterthought in most of the ecosystem. It wastes my time and tends, in practice, to cause bugs, all for no good reason. I'd say "sucks" is accurate. Not that it's the only bad format we've come up with lately (YAML, ugh).
- user3939382 4y ago
  I use JSON Schema written in JSON5. That at least fixes the commenting problem.

baxuz 4y ago

Would be great if this could be used as a web component for debugging purposes.

shanipribadi 4y ago

it still has the javascript limitation of ieee float for json numeric (hence rounding once you have bigger than 2^53) :-(

enriquto 4y ago

> JSON sucks. But we're making it better. Why would you make something better at sucking? Just gron the damn thing and grep through it like a normal person.

franciscop 4y ago

I've been frustrated with JSON when mixing text data and content due to the default prettier/JSON.stringify/browser format, which makes it very vertical, specially when mixing in 2d/3d data/arrays. I found a simple solution was to use json-beautify[1] before printing/saving data in files. Suddenly my 2000+ lines of scroll-fast JSON became 200-300 lines of highly legible data. [1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/json-beautify https://www.npmjs.com/package/json-beautify

nodomain 4y ago

Totally unclear after first glance on the site: what does it cost, what is your monetization strategy? Is it open source, for free? Please make this clearer.

mainedotpy 4y ago

Tried to use this with large (650+mb) FDA drug label JSON [0] and it does not work, offers no error message etc. Bummer. 0: https://open.fda.gov/apis/drug/label/download/ https://open.fda.gov/apis/drug/label/download/

massung 4y ago

For those looking for the ability to (locally) open and query very large JSON files, Dadroit is great: https://dadroit.com https://dadroit.com. It's been a while since I used it last, but it was a life saver for me when working with JSON lines files in S3 and Kafka log dumps. A side tidbit, IIRC, it was written in Pascal.

julianlam 4y ago

It's almost 2023, are people still looking at unformatted JSON strings in their browser? Firefox even ships with a JSON viewer enabled by default.

jordanmorgan10 4y ago

"JSON Sucks". It really doesn't though.

ilyt 4y ago
Not as readable as YAML/TOML. Vastly less if unindented. More annoying to write than YAML/TOML, no trailing comma. Yes I'd rank it lower than YAML even with its whitespace annoyances, good editor handle that, JSON is still annoying. Not super compact (althought it's not too bad when compressed). No proper numeric types, just one "sorta int, sorta float, depends on parser, say farewell to NaNs and infinities", you can't even losslessly transfer a normal IEEE flaot across it. The schema thing came late so rarely used or supported. So it really is pretty mediocre all things considered. Definitely "good enough" but could also be improved.
- jordanmorgan10 4y ago
  "Good enough" is realistic in my opinion.

olwmc 4y ago

Tangentially related, I love this website: https://vanya.jp.net/vtree/ https://vanya.jp.net/vtree/. My first interpreter had a flag -j that output the AST as JSON so that I could see it on this site.

itslennysfault 4y ago

> JSON sucks I don't understand this sentiment at all. Not even sure why we need this tool. Feels like a solution looking for a problem to me. Personally, the built-in JSON parsing/formatting in VS Code (or any other editor) is plenty for me, and for API results Firefox will automatically format / collapse it. Eg... open this link in Firefox: https://www.reddit.com/r/funny.json https://www.reddit.com/r/funny.json

thih9 4y ago

> JSON Hero only works on desktop (For now!) That’s unfortunate! I like that the landing page provides clear examples, but still, I’d prefer a full featured live demo.

insane_dreamer 4y ago

Super nice, but never going to paste/send my JSON to some web app for security reasons. Glad to see it can be run locally; might set it up on a local server.

plusminusplus 4y ago

It would be great to combine this with type annotations somehow (JSONC?) and have the UI nag you when a value doesn't match its expected type (nice demo, thanks for sharing)

DataOverload 4y ago

sieabahlpark 4y ago

redanddead 4y ago

Way better than most visualizers. Seems like an engineer built it.