How It Works

This tool parses, formats, minifies, and converts Amazon Ion text — entirely inside your browser. No data is ever sent to a server.

What is Amazon Ion?

Amazon Ion is a richly-typed, self-describing data serialisation format developed at Amazon. It is a superset of JSON — every valid JSON document is also valid Ion — and adds several data types that JSON lacks, including:

• Symbols (hello, 'with spaces') — interned string identifiers
• Timestamps (2023-01-15T) — native date/time values with nanosecond precision
• Blobs & Clobs — binary data embedded in text
• S-expressions — ordered sequences with prefix notation
• Annotations — type-level metadata attached to any value

Ion comes in two equivalent representations: a text format (used here) and a compact binary format.

Features

• Format — pretty-prints the Ion text with consistent indentation.
• Minify — serialises the Ion document with no extra whitespace.
• Convert to JSON — converts Ion to standard JSON, mapping Ion-specific types to their closest JSON equivalents (e.g. timestamps become ISO-8601 strings).

Implementation Details

The tool uses the official ion-js library (the Amazon-maintained JavaScript SDK for Ion):

• ion.load(input) parses the Ion text and returns a typed JavaScript value.
• ion.dumpPrettyText(value) serialises back to pretty-printed Ion text.
• ion.dumpText(value) serialises to compact Ion text (minification).
• JSON.stringify(value, null, 2) converts the parsed value to JSON, since ion.load returns standard JavaScript types that JSON.stringify understands.

Privacy

All processing happens locally in your browser tab. Ion payloads — which may contain sensitive business data — never leave your device.