The Utf8JsonReader struct was introduced years ago with .Net Core as a built-in alternative for reading JSON documents one token at a time as opposed to using external libraries or reading entire documents into memory at once. It was design to be a forward-only API outperforming other similar readers like those from the Newtonsoft.Json libraries. The performance however comes at the cost of convenience and ease-of-use, at least in some situations.

Nowadays when you’re dealing with Web APIs, you often find yourself in the situation of handling JSON, either in the input for these APIs or in the output, or both. Some browsers have the means to pretty print the JSON from their dev tools. But you don’t always have that opportunity. That’s why there are tools to pretty-print JSON. I’ve found quite a few of them on the web, but all the ones I’ve found have one terrible flaw: they actually send the JSON you’re trying to pretty-print to the server 🙀. I don’t want my JSON data (sensitive or not) to be sent to some random servers!