About Format Bench

Why another set of formatters

The established tools in this category work, but most of them have been gradually buried under advertising. It is normal to find twenty to forty ad slots wrapped around a textarea, with the tool itself pushed below the fold and the page taking most of a second to become usable.

Format Bench is built the other way round. Each page is a single request with its CSS and JavaScript inlined, there are no web fonts and no framework, and there are exactly two ad slots, both placed below the tool. The tool is the first thing on the page and it is interactive immediately.

Everything runs in your browser

No document you paste is uploaded, because there is no server-side processing at all. Every tool here is JavaScript running on your own machine. The only request a page makes after loading is a cookieless page-view count carrying the page's own URL, described on the privacy page; the text you work on is never part of it.

This is a practical point rather than a philosophical one. Production API responses routinely contain customer records, access tokens and other material covered by a data processing agreement, and pasting that into a hosted formatter is a disclosure. Doing the work locally removes the question.

Accuracy

Parsing uses your browser's own JSON implementation, so a document that validates here will parse identically in Node and in the browser. Where a tool makes a judgement call, such as how arrays are compared or how ambiguous CSV types are inferred, the behaviour is documented on that tool's page and exposed as an option rather than hidden.

How this site is funded

Advertising, placed below the tool rather than around it. The tools themselves stay free, and there is no paid tier that unlocks a feature the free version withholds.

Contact

Corrections and bug reports are welcome. If a tool gives a wrong result, that is a bug worth fixing, and a reproducible example is the fastest way to get it fixed. Reach us at hello@formatbench.com.