Ask HN: Good tool for inspecting JSON files?

1 point

2 years ago

I do a lot of work on web applications that return results to the client in JSON. When I am trying to debug problems I usually cut-and-paste the JSON document out of the browser's debugger into a WebStorm scratch, use the "format code" menu item to pretty print it and look at it visually.

In some cases this turns the problem up right away, the search function is useful. Sometimes it is trickier and I might run a tool like jq against the file or load the JSON into a Python REPL and process the file there.

Common situations for me are: (1) I have two responses, one that works with the client, one that doesn't and I want to find the significant difference and (2) graph-like structures, for instance a map of objects keyed by id where objects refer to other objects with ids.

What I'd really like is a GUI tool that feels like looking at the JSON file in the IDE but is smarter about browsing and would let me do some of the things I might do with jq or python. Is there anything like that out there?