Token-Oriented Object Notation (TOON) For PHP Developers

TOON (Token-Oriented Object Notation) is a tabular data format designed to reduce token overhead compared to JSON when sending large record sets to LLMs. Instead of repeating field names with every record, TOON writes them once as a header row and encodes each record as a comma-separated line. The toon-php library provides Toon::encode and Toon::decode methods for PHP developers. The video covers the problem with JSON repetition at scale, how TOON's format works, how to write system prompts so LLMs parse it correctly, and when to use TOON versus JSON.