Developer tool chain

What is different about chaining here

The share link carries the chain and your input in the part of the URL after the #. Browsers never send a fragment, so opening that link does not put your paste on a server, including ours. A query string would.

Here the whole pipeline is a series of function calls on one string in one tab. Adding a step just runs one more function on that string and sends nothing, so once the page has loaded, the chain keeps working with the network off.

The three chains worth knowing

Read a JWT payload

Take the middle segment of the token, add Base64 decode, then Format JSON. Two steps, and the claims are readable. Pasting a whole token into a decoder site is one of the more common ways a credential ends up in somebody else's logs, and it is worth doing this one locally on principle.

Here it is on a sample segment: eyJzdWIiOiJ1c2VyLTQyIiwicm9sZSI6ImVkaXRvciIsImV4cCI6MTc2NzIyNTYwMH0. The Base64 decode panel shows {"sub":"user-42","role":"editor","exp":1767225600} and reports that it read 67 Base64 characters, 0 of them padding, and decoded them to 50 bytes. The Format JSON panel prints the same three members over 5 lines with 2-space indentation and says the value came back unchanged. The exp claim is a Unix time in seconds: 1767225600 is midnight UTC on January 1, 2026.

A caveat the tool cannot enforce: a JWT payload is base64url encoded and unpadded, so a strict decoder rejects it. Ours accepts it, which is described on the base64 page. Decoding a token does not verify it, either. Reading the claims tells you what it says, not whether the signature is genuine.

Compare a payload against a checksum

Sort JSON keys, then SHA-256. Sort JSON keys sorts the top-level keys and prints the result as compact JSON with no spaces, so two copies of an object that differ only in spacing or in the order of their top-level keys produce the same digest. It does not reorder keys inside nested objects. {"b":{"y":1,"x":2},"a":1} and {"a":1,"b":{"x":2,"y":1}} hold the same data, but the inner keys keep their written order, so the digests differ: one starts 55b65323, the other 966ca4f1. Adding Format JSON before the sort changes nothing, because the sort step replaces its layout. Use this chain when the two copies differ only at the top level. If parsing would rewrite a number or drop a duplicate key, that step still produces the rewritten document and says so beside the panel; SHA-256 then hashes those visible bytes, not the original paste.

Clean up a pasted list

Trim every line, then Sort lines, then Unique lines. Copying a column out of a spreadsheet or a terminal picks up trailing spaces that make otherwise identical entries look different, so trimming has to come first. The order of the steps is the whole trick.

When a step fails

The chain stops at the failing step and says which one and why. Everything above it already ran and its output is still shown; nothing below it ran at all. Downstream panels read upstream step failed rather than inventing an answer from the last good value.

That is usually the fastest way to find the real problem. A five-step pipeline that fails at step four tells you that steps one to three were fine, which narrows things considerably compared with a single error at the end.

The formula and standard behind each step

Eight of the thirteen steps name a specification beside the panel. Base64 follows RFC 4648, including the URL-safe alphabet in section 5 when - or _ is in the input. Percent-encoding follows the WHATWG URL Standard component set; a literal + on decode stays a plus, the RFC 3986 reading. JSON follows RFC 8259. SHA-256 comes from the browser's own SubtleCrypto implementation of FIPS 180-4, not from a copy of the algorithm shipped in this page. The other five steps name their behavior instead, in a different style, because no specification governs them.

Each step follows the same rules as its own tool page, so a value is decoded, sorted or hashed the same way here and there. Layout can differ: Sort JSON keys here prints compact JSON, while the JSON formatter's Sort keys prints it indented, so hash the chain's output rather than a copy taken from the formatter.

Questions

Related tools

Each step also has a page of its own, with the detail this one skips: base64, URL encoding, the JSON formatter and the hash generator. If what you actually want is to compare two results rather than transform one, use the diff checker.