TOML (Tom's Obvious, Minimal Language) is a configuration file format designed to be easy to read and write. It's the native config format for Rust's Cargo (Cargo.toml), Python's pyproject.toml, Hugo static sites, and Deno. TOML supports typed values (strings, integers, floats, booleans, dates), nested tables, and inline tables — making it more expressive than INI files while remaining simpler than YAML.
When should you convert TOML to JSON?
TOML-to-JSON conversion is useful when processing configuration files programmatically in JavaScript or Python, when migrating project configs between ecosystems, or when you need to validate TOML structure against a JSON schema. Unlike YAML, TOML has no ambiguity in parsing — the same TOML always produces the same data structure.