Key-value text parser

About this tool

Key-value text shows up everywhere: pasted HTTP headers, form exports, scan metadata, support tickets, email snippets, invoice notes, and configuration fragments. They are easy for humans to read but annoying to feed into scripts because each source chooses its own separator, repeats fields in different ways, and mixes useful lines with headings or comments.

This parser turns that messy text into JSON. It understands key: value, key=value, tab-separated rows, pipes, or a custom separator like ->. By default it skips prose lines, trims whitespace, removes one matching pair of quotes around values, and groups repeated keys into arrays so information is not silently overwritten.

Choose records when blank lines separate people, products, or tickets. Choose pairs when order and source line numbers matter more than a folded object. Turn on type inference only when you want unquoted true, false, null, and safe numbers to become real JSON values — IDs with leading zeros stay strings.

Worked example

Input:

Title: Quarterly report
Owner: Ada
tag: finance
tag: draft
Reviewed = false

With duplicate grouping, snake_case keys, and type inference enabled, output is:

{
  "title": "Quarterly report",
  "owner": "Ada",
  "tag": [
    "finance",
    "draft"
  ],
  "reviewed": false
}

For multiple records, put a blank line between blocks:

name: Ada
role: engineer

name: Grace
role: admiral

and select Blank-line records to get:

[
  {
    "name": "Ada",
    "role": "engineer"
  },
  {
    "name": "Grace",
    "role": "admiral"
  }
]

Options and limits

• Up to 10,000 input lines per run.
• auto separator uses whichever of : or = appears first on each line, so URLs such as https://example.test/a=b stay in the value when the first separator is the colon after the key.
• Duplicate-key policies are group, last, first, and error.
• Comment prefixes are comma-separated and match after leading whitespace. The default skips lines beginning with #, ;, or //.
• Type inference is conservative: leading-zero IDs and +15551234-style phone numbers remain strings.
• The parser is line-oriented. It does not try to parse full YAML, TOML, INI sections, quoted multiline values, or nested objects.

FAQ