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Cover image for πŸš€ TOON (Token-Oriented Object Notation) β€” The Smarter, Lighter JSON for LLMs

πŸš€ TOON (Token-Oriented Object Notation) β€” The Smarter, Lighter JSON for LLMs

abhilaksh-arora on November 02, 2025

When building AI and LLM-based applications, one of the biggest hidden costs often comes from something simple β€” the format of your data. Every {}...
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Ali Farhat • Edited

Interesting take. I’ve built a lightweight JSON β†’ TOON Converter for quick benchmarking between both formats.
Sharing here in case others want to experiment:
scalevise.com/json-toon-converter

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vasanthkumar

page not found

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Ali Farhat
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Alex CΓ‘ceres

I've created this converter to quickly see the savings, very simple to use:
toon.click/

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MΓ‘rio Malček • Edited

I've just added support for TOON encoding to my converter utility. mmalcek.github.io/bafi/ as easy as ./bafi -i input.json -t "?{{ toTOON . }}" :)

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Rakesh Gajjar

Godo article, would appriciate if you can include more quantifying numbers of token optimized for various file format like programming code(.py, .cpp files), CSV and flat text files

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Kush Jaiswal

This is available in their Github readme, with different token usage of each format for different LLM models.

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Nouman

Created a Dart package for JSON-to-toon conversions. Please give it a look.
Package: pub.dev/packages/toonx
Github: github.com/TheNoumanDev/toonX

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Dan Jones

Since it's less efficient for nested data, and is only useful for tabular data, I fail to see how this format is better than CSV or TSV.

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JaRo

This is great, thanks a lot!

Roughly half the tokens.

That's just awesome :)