i stopped using online json formatters and built my own

every time i needed to format some json, i'd google "json formatter", click the first result, paste my data, and grab the formatted output. did this for years. then one day i was debugging an API response that had user emails, auth tokens, and internal IDs in it. pasted the whole thing into some random website without thinking. that was the moment i realized how dumb that was. the problem with online formatters when you paste data into a web-based tool, you have no idea what happens to it. some of these sites: log everything you paste to their servers run analytics on your input data store it temporarily (or permanently) for "improving their service" some are literally just data collection fronts even the "good" ones that say they process client-side — how do you verify that? you'd need to audit their js bundle, check for beacon calls, inspect network requests. nobody does that. for formatting json? you don't need a server. it's a completely client-side operation. JSON.parse() and JSON