Cutting to the chase, I choose Vladimir Bodurov’s Color Formatter!
For the past year or so, I’ve been working on a project that uses Microsoft’s ASP.NET MVC for providing data to our pure JavaScript application. That is, there are no web forms, no dynamic HTML generation, just 100% JavaScript running on the client. I’m using a library called ExtJS which gives us high quality “forms like” user interactions and MVC for getting the data. That is, the Application looks like this:
The data retrieval URL used by the JavaScript look like:
http://www.mycompany.com/data/Company/Get
And, the JSON that comes back using either FireBug or Fiddler looks like this:
Problem is that it’s hard to read the JSON data. Firebug does a reasonable job of formatting, but it’s still not perfect. Up until now, the way I always have formatted the data is to type into bing or Google “format json” and the first reasonable choice has been http://jsonformat.com/. Cutting and pasting my data into it shows:
However, my new favorite JSON Formatter makes the data look like this:
( http://www.bodurov.com/JsonFormatter/ )
(more information at: http://blog.bodurov.com/Formatter-and-colorer-of-raw-JSON-code)
And, it’s available as simple html you can run on your own server here at codeplex:
http://www.codeplex.com/QuickJsonFormatter/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=10136
IMHO, much cleaner, shows me the data both before and after, as well as colorizes it which always makes me happy.