JSON Key Sorter

About this tool

JSON Key Sorter parses your JSON, recursively reorders every object's keys, and re-serializes the result — so two documents with the same data always produce the same text. That makes diffs small and reviews easy: reordered keys stop showing up as spurious changes in version control.

Sorting is recursive: keys are reordered at every level of nesting, inside objects that live in arrays too. By default only object keys move — array element order is left alone, because array order is usually meaningful (a list of steps, a priority order). Turn on Also sort array elements when the arrays are really unordered sets and you want them canonicalized as well.

The input is validated before anything is sorted, so invalid JSON is rejected with the parser's exact line and column instead of producing garbled output.

Worked example

Input:

{ "b": 1, "a": { "z": 2, "y": 3 } }

With Sort direction = Ascending and Indent = 2, the output is:

{
  "a": {
    "y": 3,
    "z": 2
  },
  "b": 1
}

The top-level keys become a, b and the nested z, y become y, z. Set Indent to 0 to collapse the whole thing onto one compact line: {"a":{"y":3,"z":2},"b":1}.

Options

• Sort direction — Ascending (A→Z, default) or Descending (Z→A).
• Also sort array elements — off by default; when on, array items are ordered by their serialized value so the ordering is total across mixed types.
• Case-insensitive — off by default (codepoint order, where uppercase sorts before lowercase); on groups Name next to name. Keys that differ only in case keep a stable case-sensitive tie-break so the result is deterministic.
• Indent spaces — 1–8 spaces per level (default 2), or 0 to minify.

FAQ