What Is JSON? Why Your Script Keeps Producing Curly Brackets

Snapdock

— 3 min read
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What Is JSON? Why Your Script Keeps Producing Curly Brackets

You ran your script and something came back. Not an error — something that almost looks like data. Curly brackets, square brackets, colons, commas, words in quotes. It is clearly organised in some way but it does not look like anything you expected. If you have ever opened a file your script produced and thought "what on earth am I looking at," this post is for you.

It is not broken output. It is not gibberish. It is JSON — and once you know the pattern, you can read it in about thirty seconds.

JSON Is Just a Way of Organising Information

JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation. Forget that immediately — it tells you almost nothing useful about what it actually is.

Here is what it actually is.

Imagine you wanted to write down everything about a customer in a way that both a human and a computer could read. In plain English you might write:

Name: Sarah Last login: 14 March 2026 Orders: Order 1042, £84.99, shipped. Order 1043, £112.50, pending.

JSON is the same information, written in a strict format that computers can reliably read, process, and pass between different systems:

{
  "name": "Sarah",
  "last_login": "2026-03-14",
  "orders": [
    {"id": 1042, "total": 84.99, "status": "shipped"},
    {"id": 1043, "total": 112.50, "status": "pending"}
  ]
}

Every piece of information has a label and a value. Name is the label, Sarah is the value. Curly brackets group related information together. Square brackets hold lists of things.

That is the entire logic of JSON. Labels and values, grouped and listed. Once you see it that way, the curly brackets stop looking random.

Why Your Script Produces It

When people ask "why does my script output a JSON file" or "why does my API response look weird," the answer is almost always the same: JSON has become the universal language that software uses to pass information between systems.

When your script talks to an API — fetching orders from Shopify, reading a Google Sheet, pulling weather data — the response almost always comes back as JSON. Not because it is beautiful or human-friendly, but because every programming language in the world can read and write it. It is the common ground between systems that do not share any other language.

Your script is not producing broken output. It is producing exactly the format the rest of the software world uses to share data.

Why It Looks So Hard to Read

The compact version — everything crammed onto one line — is genuinely hard to read. This is the version that makes people think their output is broken:

{"name":"Sarah","orders":[{"id":1042,"total":84.99,"status":"shipped"}]}

The same data with proper spacing is completely different:

{
  "name": "Sarah",
  "orders": [
    {
      "id": 1042,
      "total": 84.99,
      "status": "shipped"
    }
  ]
}

Same information. One looks like noise. One looks like a structured record you can actually read. The only difference is formatting.

If you open a JSON file and it looks like noise, paste it into jsonformatter.org — it will lay it out cleanly in one click, completely free, no account needed. Or open it in VS Code, which formats and colour-codes it automatically.

How to Ask Your AI to Make It More Readable

If your script is producing JSON output you cannot make sense of, do not struggle with it alone. Paste a sample of the output back into your ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini chat and ask:

"This is the output my script is producing. Can you explain what each part means and rewrite the script to show me just the parts I actually care about in plain text?"

The AI can read JSON fluently. It can extract specific values, reformat the output as a readable summary, or rewrite your script to produce something more human-friendly. You do not need to learn JSON syntax to work with it — you just need to know you can hand it straight back to the AI and ask for a translation.

The One Thing to Remember

JSON is a universal format for organising and sharing data — labels paired with values, grouped with curly brackets, listed with square brackets. It looks like noise until you know the pattern. Once you know the pattern, you can read it. And when you cannot, your AI can.

Want your script processing JSON and running on a real schedule? → Snapdock

New here? This might help: What is an API? The honest explanation nobody bothers to give you →

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