Minify JSON

Pretty-printed JSON is written for people. Machines do not need the indentation and line breaks, and in some places they cost real money or break things: a config value stored in an environment variable must fit on one line, a JSON payload inside a URL or a data attribute should be as short as possible, and an API response sent millions of times a day pays for every byte. Minifying removes all whitespace that is not inside a string and leaves the data exactly as it was.

The minifier parses your JSON first, so it doubles as a validator: if there is a trailing comma, a missing quote or a comment, you get the line and column of the problem instead of silently broken output. The result shows the original size, the minified size and the percentage saved, in UTF-8 bytes, which is what goes over the network. Optionally, keys can be sorted alphabetically at every level, so two documents with the same content minify to the same text, which helps when comparing, caching or hashing them.

Minification is not compression. HTTP servers usually gzip or Brotli-compress responses, which removes most of the benefit of minifying for large files; minifying still helps with small payloads, storage in databases and anywhere compression is not applied. Everything runs locally, so API keys and customer data you paste are never transmitted.