JSON Path Tester

About this tool

JSONPath does for JSON roughly what a file path does for a filesystem — a compact string notation for pointing at a specific location (or set of locations) inside a document, without writing a loop or a chain of property accesses by hand. $.store.books[0].title says exactly one thing: start at the root, go into store, then books, take the first element, then its title. That's often faster to write and test than the equivalent JavaScript, and it's genuinely useful independent of any particular programming language — for exploring an unfamiliar API response, for documenting exactly which field a bug report is about, or for configuring a system (many logging and monitoring tools accept JSONPath-style expressions to extract specific fields).

The full JSONPath specification includes features well beyond simple property access — filter expressions that select array items matching a condition, array slicing, and script expressions that can run arbitrary logic against each candidate node. Implementing all of that correctly and securely (script expressions in particular are exactly the kind of feature that turns into a code-injection risk if handled carelessly) is a meaningfully large undertaking, and pulling in a full third-party JSONPath library would work against this hub's goal of staying lightweight and dependency-free.

So this tool implements a clearly documented subset: root access ($), dot-notation property access (.key), bracket notation for quoted keys (['key']) and numeric indices ([index]), a wildcard for "every item or property" ([*]), and recursive descent to find a key anywhere below the current point regardless of depth (..key). That covers the large majority of everyday JSONPath use — pulling a specific field out of a nested structure, mapping over an array, or finding every occurrence of a key without knowing exactly where it sits in the tree — without pretending to support syntax it doesn't. If you type an unsupported construct like a filter expression, the tool tells you clearly rather than silently returning nothing or a wrong answer.

The result is always an array of every matching value, since a path with a wildcard or recursive descent can legitimately match more than one location — even a path that matches exactly one value returns it inside a single-item array, for consistency. Everything runs locally in your browser; nothing you paste is sent anywhere.