Remove empty, null & blank values from JSON online

Real-world data is full of placeholder holes: a "note": "" nobody filled in, a "tags": [] that never got populated, a "middle_name": null from a database column that allows nulls. Remove Empties deletes every key, list item, or table column whose value is empty in one click, then rewrites the document so it stays valid in its current format.

A value is treated as empty — and removed — when it is:

• null or undefined
• the empty string ""
• an empty array []
• an empty object {}

Everything else is kept. In particular, the cleanup is deliberately conservative so a stray click can never destroy real data: the number 0, false, and NaN are meaningful values and are never removed, and a whitespace-only string like " " is preserved too.

1. Paste or open your data in the Yellorn editor (JSON, YAML, XML, TOML, JSON Lines, CSV, or an ASCII table).
2. Open the Format menu in the editor toolbar — the split button whose primary action is Smart Format — and choose Remove Empties under the Minify group.
3. The editor is rewritten with the empty entries gone, and the status bar reports how many were removed (for example, “Removed 5 empty values”). One ⌘ + Z restores the original if you need it back.

Here is a typical object with a mix of empty holes and meaningful falsy values. Notice that age: 0 and active: false survive, because 0 and false are real data — only the genuinely empty fields are dropped:

// Before:
{
  "name": "Ada",
  "note": "",
  "tags": [],
  "meta": {},
  "age": 0,
  "active": false,
  "address": null
}

// After Remove Empties:
{
  "name": "Ada",
  "age": 0,
  "active": false
}

Pruning is recursive. Yellorn cleans the leaves first, then re-checks their parents: an object or array that becomes empty after its own empty children are removed is itself dropped by its parent. So an object whose every field is empty collapses all the way up:

// Before:
{
  "user": {
    "name": "",
    "roles": [],
    "prefs": { "theme": "" }
  }
}

// After Remove Empties:
{}

The document root itself is never deleted — you are cleaning a file, not throwing it away — so a top-level empty object or array is returned unchanged with nothing removed.

Remove Empties works across Yellorn's structured formats. Value-shaped formats — JSON, YAML, XML, TOML, and JSON Lines — prune empty keys and list items recursively, exactly like the JSON examples above.

Tabular formats behave differently on purpose. Deleting individual empty cells would make rows ragged and break the table's rectangular shape, so for CSV and ASCII tables Remove Empties instead drops whole columns that are empty in every row, and whole rows that are empty across every remaining column:

Before (the "note" and "archived" columns are empty everywhere):
id,name,note,archived
1,Ada,,
2,Lin,,

After Remove Empties:
id,name
1,Ada
2,Lin

SQL and Raw Text have no key/value or tabular structure to clean, so the Remove Empties row is shown disabled for them. Everything runs in your browser — nothing you paste is ever uploaded to a server.

← All help articles · Normalize lists with Clean List · Fix broken JSON · View JSON as a tree, graph, or table · Usage guide