Beautify

Beautify is the verb form used in most web-based developer tools for re-formatting a compact document into a human-readable one. A “JSON beautifier” is a tool that takes minified JSON input and produces pretty-printed output.

In strict terms, “beautify” and “pretty-print” mean the same thing: re-insert whitespace, apply consistent indentation, break structures onto separate lines, and leave the semantic content alone. The two terms coexist mostly because:

• “Pretty-print” is the term used in language documentation, standard libraries, and older literature. json.dumps(indent=2), JSON.stringify(obj, null, 2), and jq . are all described as pretty-printing in their respective docs.
• “Beautify” is the term used in consumer-facing tools and IDE features. “Beautify code” is a common menu item in JetBrains IDEs, VS Code extensions, and browser developer tools. It also tends to imply a slightly broader scope — a JavaScript beautifier may not just re-indent but also rewrite compact one-liners into multi-line form.

What beautify may include that strict pretty-print does not

• Line wrapping — splitting long lines at logical boundaries (e.g. after commas or operators).
• Statement separation — turning a;b;c; into three lines.
• Attribute reformatting — putting each HTML attribute on its own line when there are many.
• Trailing whitespace removal.
• Normalising quote style — single quotes to double quotes, or vice versa, in the output.

A beautifier is typically a superset of a pretty-printer. Both produce human-readable output; the beautifier does a bit more surgery.

In our tool

The JSON tool on this site uses the label “Beautify” because the behaviour includes:

• Re-indent with your chosen indent (2 / 4 / tab).
• Optional alphabetical key sorting.
• Consistent quoting (JSON mandates double quotes anyway, so this is baked in).
• Normalised spacing inside arrays and after commas.

For a document that was already minified, our Beautify produces the same output as any standard library’s pretty-print. For a document that was already pretty but with inconsistent indentation, Beautify normalises it.