About PawFormatter

PawFormatter is a free, privacy-first toolkit for beautifying and converting structured data. It supports JSON, YAML, TOML, XML, and TOON, and it runs entirely in your browser. There is no sign-up, no upload, and no cost — you paste or open your data, choose what you want to do with it, and get the result instantly on your own device.

Why we built it

Anyone who works with configuration files or APIs ends up needing to reformat or convert structured data constantly: pretty-printing a minified blob of JSON to read it, turning a YAML config into JSON for a tool that expects JSON, or checking whether an XML document is well formed. The quickest way to do this online has traditionally been to paste your data into some random website — which is a problem when that data contains database credentials, API keys, or personal information. PawFormatter was built to give you the same convenience without ever sending your data to a server.

Privacy first

Your data is processed locally using open-source JavaScript libraries that run inside your browser tab. Nothing is uploaded to a server, nothing is logged, and nothing is stored after you close the page. Because the parsing and conversion code is already loaded into your browser, you can even disconnect from the internet and keep working. This client-side approach means that even we, the people who make PawFormatter, never see the data you work with.

What it does

• Beautify (pretty-print) JSON, YAML, TOML, XML, and TOON so that dense or minified data becomes readable, correctly indented, and easy to scan.
• Convert data between any of those formats, so you can move a config from one ecosystem to another without rewriting it by hand.
• Copy or download the result as a file with a single click.

The formats we support

Each of the five formats has its own strengths, and part of PawFormatter's job is to translate faithfully between them:

• JSON — the universal data-interchange format, strict and unambiguous.
• YAML — human-friendly configuration with comments and minimal punctuation.
• TOML — clear, table-based configuration popular with modern tooling.
• XML — the long-established markup format still common in enterprise systems.
• TOON — a compact, token-oriented notation.

Some conversions cannot be perfectly lossless because the formats differ in what they can express — for example, XML has no native array type, and comments do not survive a round trip through JSON. When a conversion involves one of these trade-offs, the tool is designed to make a sensible, predictable choice. You can read more about this in our guide on JSON vs YAML and our walkthrough of converting TOML to JSON.

Who it's for

PawFormatter is aimed at developers, system administrators, technical writers, and anyone else who regularly touches config files or API payloads. It is equally useful for a quick one-off cleanup and for a privacy- conscious workflow where pasting data into a remote service is simply not acceptable.

Open-source libraries

PawFormatter is built with permissively licensed open-source libraries, including js-yaml, smol-toml, fast-xml-parser, and the TOON reference library. We are grateful to the maintainers of these projects, whose work makes fast, reliable, in-browser parsing possible.

Questions or feedback?

If you have a question, spot a bug, or want to suggest a feature, please visit our contact page or email us at contact@vlmh.work. We read every message.