littlejson

A lightweight CLI for compressing and decompressing JSON files.

littlejson utilizes MessagePack for efficient binary serialization of JSON data, offering potentially significant size reductions for your JSON files.

Features

• Compress JSON to LJSON: Reduces file size using MessagePack binary encoding.
• Decompress LJSON to JSON: Restores compressed LJSON files back to readable JSON format.
• Simple CLI: Easy-to-use command-line interface with clear instructions.
• File size analysis: Provides details about the original size, compressed/decompressed size, and the percentage of change.

Installation

Global Installation: If you perform a global installation, you can use the littlejson command directly instead of running it through npx.

npm install -g littlejson

Usage

Compressing JSON Files

To compress a JSON file into a .ljson file:

npx littlejson compress <input-file.json> [output-file.ljson]

• <input-file.json>: The path to your JSON input file.
• [output-file.ljson]: (Optional) The desired path for the compressed output file. If not provided, the output file will be named with the same base name as the input but with the .ljson extension, saved in the current working directory.

Example:

npx littlejson compress data.json compressed.ljson
# or
npx littlejson compress data.json

Decompressing LJSON Files

To decompress a .ljson file back into a .json file:

npx littlejson decompress <input-file.ljson> [output-file.json]

• <input-file.ljson>: The path to your LJSON input file.
• [output-file.json]: (Optional) The desired path for the decompressed output file. If not provided, the output file will be named with the same base name as the input but with the .json extension, saved in the current working directory.

Example:

npx littlejson decompress compressed.ljson decompressed.json
# or
npx littlejson decompress compressed.ljson

Output

The CLI provides useful details upon completion:

• Success/error messages
• Original file size
• Compressed/Decompressed file size
• Compression/Size change percentage

License

MIT

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Feel free to submit a pull request or open an issue.