DraganSr: 2023-12-10

Sunday, December 10, 2023

Hanson: JSON for Humans

timjansen/hanson: JSON for Humans - with unquoted identifiers, multi-line strings and comments @GitHub

HanSON is an extension of JSON that fixes its shortcomings with a few simple additions to the JSON spec:

quotes for strings are optional if they follow JavaScript identifier rules.
you can alternatively use backticks, as in ES6's template string literal, as quotes for strings. A backtick-quoted string may span several lines and you are not required to escape regular quote characters, only backticks. Backslashes still need to be escaped, and all other backslash-escape sequences work like in regular JSON.
for single-line strings, single quotes ('') are supported in addition to double quotes ("")
you can use JavaScript comments, both single line (//) and multi-line comments (/* */), in all places where JSON allows whitespace.
Commas after the last list element or object property will be ignored.

Example HanSON

{
  listName: "Sesame Street Monsters", // note that listName needs no quotes
  content: [
    {
      name: "Cookie Monster",
      /* Note the template quotes and unescaped regular quotes in the next string */
      background: `Cookie Monster used to be a
monster that ate everything, especially cookies.
These days he is forced to eat "healthy" food.`
    }, {
      // You can single-quote strings too:
      name: 'Herry Monster',
      background: `Herry Monster is a furry blue monster with a purple nose.
He's mostly retired today.`
    },    // don't worry, the trailing comma will be ignored
   ]
}