[javascript] How to decode jwt token in javascript without using a library?

If you're using Typescript or vanilla JavaScript, here's a zero-dependency, ready to copy-paste in your project simple function (building on @Rajan Maharjan 's answer).

This answer is particularly good, not only because it does not depend on any npm module, but also because it does not depend an any node.js built-in module (like Buffer) that some other solutions here are using and of course would fail in the browser (unless polyfilled, but there's no reason to do that in the first place). Additionally JSON.parse can fail at runtime and this version (especially in Typescript) will force handling of that. The JSDoc annotations will make future maintainers of your code thankful. :)

/**
 * Returns a JS object representation of a Javascript Web Token from it's common encoded
 * string form.
 *
 * @export
 * @template T the expected shape of the parsed token
 * @param {string} token a Javascript Web Token in base64 encoded, `.` separated form
 * @returns {(T | undefined)} an object-representation of the token
 * or undefined if parsing failed
 */
export function getParsedJwt<T extends object = { [k: string]: string | number }>(
  token: string,
): T | undefined {
  try {
    return JSON.parse(atob(token.split('.')[1]))
  } catch {
    return undefined
  }
}

For completion, here's the vanilla javascript version too:

/**
 * Returns a JS object representation of a Javascript Web Token from it's common encoded
 * string form.
 *
 * @export
 * @template T the expected shape of the parsed token
 * @param {string} token a Javascript Web Token in base64 encoded, `.` separated form
 * @returns {(object | undefined)} an object-representation of the token
 * or undefined if parsing failed
 */
export function getParsedJwt(token) {
  try {
    return JSON.parse(atob(token.split('.')[1]))
  } catch (e) {
    return undefined
  }
}