Over the last few years, I have found myself installing more software to do simple things than ever before. Perhaps this is a nostalgic view on the past but I remember being able to use lots of browser-based tools without seeing a lot of ads, having my information sent to an opaque server or downloading lots of adware. Now even simple things like formatting something so it's easier to read or converting from one format to another feels like signing up for an advertising experiment. Maybe because on many sites, it is.
But rather than complain and do nothing, I decided to do something (and I just complained so the circle is complete). Over the last several months I've been building some useful tools on my tools hub. Over the last month, I've built a json formatter, an ndjson formatter and a JSON-LD sanity checker whose name is a reference to a bit of fun I had after having one of those lovely 'oh crap' moments after typing git push.
After I finished the NDJSON and JSON formatters, I thought a good next step would be writing tools to convert between the two. And I just released my first one today - a privacy-conscious NDJSON to JSON converter. As you know, I have a certain habit of coming up with hyperliteral product names (except for Siteimp) and so this likely won't shock you much. But my NDJSON to JSON converter takes newline-delimited JSON (NDJSON) and turns it into a JSON array. It makes NDJSON easier to inspect, format, validate, copy into documentation, or reuse.
Woah dude, the guy who comes up with literal names for things just did it again, I'm shocked man.
Once I finished the naming process (it was rigorous) I had to start really thinking about how this tool would fit in with the rest of my tools. And my work with Siteimp has given me plenty of good reasons to build out a more complete toolkit for working with both newline-delimited JSON and JSON. The Siteimp logger uses NDJSON because there is a lot going on during scan time and I really needed the safety and of log streaming for scan times. Log streaming is also really useful for replay, which is the next evolution of the Siteimp toolkit.
But Siteimp contains a lot of technical support material built into the application because again, customers deserve that. I use JSON extensively in providing both technical support and in-app content. So since I use them both, it made a lot of sense for me to build out my own tooling. That way I wouldn't have to install software for easy things like this, wouldn't subject my own data to someone else's marketing study and could provide it to anyone who finds it useful for free. And not free as in you're looking at ads or that I'm collecting your data. Free and with as much privacy as I can reasonably provide today.
Try converting NDJSON to JSON here -this tool is useful if you have NDJSON logs, JSONL exports, streamed records or line-delimited test data and need to turn them into one regular JSON array for formatting, validation, documentation or reuse.
To finish this with an important note about your privacy, I don't have Google Analytics or any other analytics solution installed on my website. This website does use Cloudflare though so you'll be subject to their privacy policy when you use my website. But if you are concerned, my tools provide instructions on how to verify they don't send your data to anyone. Feel free to go offline when you try them out or open up your browser's development tools and watch what happens when you convert an NDJSON file to JSON.
Nothing.
Enjoy using the tool and I hope it helps you build something really cool. Or heck, just steal the code and host this on your own website. I don't care.