Format Lizard

A small JavaScript formatter app for JSON, XML, YAML, and CSS.

Open index.html in a browser, paste compact or messy data into the left editor, or use Open to load a local .json, .xml, .config, .yaml, .yml, or .css file. Then format or minify it into the right editor. Use Save to download the formatted output as a .json, .xml, .yaml, or .css file.

For logo, color, versioning, and publishing details, see BRAND_AND_DEPLOYMENT.md.

Supported Formats

• JSON
• XML
• YAML
• CSS

JSON tools:

• Auto-detect JSON/XML/YAML/CSS from pasted content.
• View formatted JSON as an expandable tree.
• Sort object keys before formatting or minifying JSON.
• Unescape JSON strings, such as "{\"name\":\"Ada\"}", into editable JSON.
• Convert JSON to XML.

YAML support covers common configuration-file shapes: mappings, lists, nested values, strings, booleans, nulls, and numbers.

CSS support covers standard stylesheets, including comments, selectors, declarations, @media, and @keyframes.

Good next candidates:

• CSV, for table-shaped data.
• HTML, for markup snippets.
• SQL, for database queries.
• Markdown, for prose cleanup.

GitHub Pages

The site publishes from the remote gh-pages branch:

https://davidbreyer.github.io/format-lizard/

Normal deployment flow:

git add -- ...
git commit -m "Some change"
git push origin master
git push origin master:gh-pages

master stores the source/history. gh-pages is the branch GitHub Pages serves publicly.

Release Stamp

The footer displays the current version:

Version: YYYYMMDD-HHMM

The value lives in script.js:

const appRelease = "YYYYMMDD-HHMM";

The same value is used for cache-busting query strings in index.html for CSS and JavaScript files.

Git Hooks

The repo includes a pre-commit hook that updates the release stamp automatically before each commit.

Enable it once per local clone:

git config core.hooksPath .githooks

After that, every git commit runs:

scripts/update-release.ps1

The script updates:

• const appRelease in script.js
• the visible footer version in index.html
• all ?v=... cache-busting query strings in index.html

The hook stages index.html and script.js so the generated release stamp is included in the commit.