TOML: config files meant to be read by humans
TOML (Tom's Obvious Minimal Language) is the config format behind Cargo.toml (Rust), pyproject.toml (Python), and countless CLI tools. It was designed to map unambiguously to a hash table, so every parser produces the same structure.
When you need to feed a Cargo.toml or pyproject.toml into a script, or inspect what a tool's config actually resolves to, converting it to JSON is the fastest way to see the real shape.
What the conversion preserves
TOML has a small, strict type system that maps cleanly onto JSON.
Common use cases
Rust developers paste a Cargo.toml here to check exactly which dependency versions and features a workspace resolves to. Python developers do the same with pyproject.toml to debug build-system or tool configuration.
Because parsing runs entirely in your browser, it is safe to paste config files that contain internal package names or private registry URLs.