Parsing JSON is a Minefield

#1

Post by moks » Sun, Apr 22, 2018, 4:58 PM UTC

Re: Parsing JSON is a Minefield

#2

Post by JasonFruit » Sun, Apr 22, 2018, 6:07 PM UTC

This is interesting and important in one way: anything poorly specified will eventually cause a problem for someone, somewhere. That being said, my first response was to complete the title, ". . . yet it remains useful and nearly trouble-free in practice." There's a lot of, "You know what I mean!" in the JSON definition, but in most cases, we really do know what Crockford means.

Re: Parsing JSON is a Minefield

#3

Post by jwilk » Sun, Apr 22, 2018, 6:09 PM UTC

Previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12796556

Re: Parsing JSON is a Minefield

#4

Post by eponeponepon » Sun, Apr 22, 2018, 6:11 PM UTC

This is the one thing that the JSON-against-XML holy warriors need to understand properly. Yes, JSON's less verbose; yes, it's just "plain text" (in as much as there is such a thing); yes, XML makes you put closing tags in - but if you need reliable parsing and rock-solid specifications (and it's reasonably likely that you do, even if you think you don't...), then XML, for all its faults, is very likely the better way.

Re: Parsing JSON is a Minefield

#5

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Apr 22, 2018, 6:16 PM UTC

eponeponepon wrote: post #4

This is the one thing that the JSON-against-XML holy warriors need to understand properly. Yes, JSON's less verbose; yes, it's just "plain text" (in as much as there is such a thing); yes, XML makes you put closing tags in - but if you need reliable parsing and rock-solid specifications (and it's reasonably likely that you do, even if you think you don't...), then XML, for all its faults, is very likely the better wa…

[deleted]

Re: Parsing JSON is a Minefield

#6

Post by threepipeproblm » Sun, Apr 22, 2018, 6:19 PM UTC

TOML is supposed to be easy to parse.

Re: Parsing JSON is a Minefield

#7

Post by jstimpfle » Sun, Apr 22, 2018, 6:19 PM UTC

eponeponepon wrote: post #4

This is the one thing that the JSON-against-XML holy warriors need to understand properly. Yes, JSON's less verbose; yes, it's just "plain text" (in as much as there is such a thing); yes, XML makes you put closing tags in - but if you need reliable parsing and rock-solid specifications (and it's reasonably likely that you do, even if you think you don't...), then XML, for all its faults, is very likely the better wa…

Xml sort-of died (in many domains) because of its insane complexity and its redundant ways of specifying relations (child relationships vs explicit relationships, tag name data, attributes data, body data), lack of legibility, parser performance (probably an inherent problem due to hierarchical representation?) and other issues like even meaning of whitespace. >50% of the JSON or Xml I've seen would actually be much easier to read and have much clearer semantics, if just written as a relational database. Some time ago, I tried to improve on CSV by specifying it better and making it more powerful. The result was not too bad: http://jstimpfle.de/projects/wsl/main.html . But I think it should be trimmed down even more, and have only built-in datatypes like JSON, to be able to replace it. (More ambitious standardization efforts would lead to similar problems as with Xml, I think). That's why so far I use the approach only in ad-hoc implementations, in different flavours needed for various tasks.

Re: Parsing JSON is a Minefield

#8

Post by mixedCase » Sun, Apr 22, 2018, 6:20 PM UTC

eponeponepon wrote: post #4

This is the one thing that the JSON-against-XML holy warriors need to understand properly. Yes, JSON's less verbose; yes, it's just "plain text" (in as much as there is such a thing); yes, XML makes you put closing tags in - but if you need reliable parsing and rock-solid specifications (and it's reasonably likely that you do, even if you think you don't...), then XML, for all its faults, is very likely the better wa…

If I needed such strictness in parsing I'd fall back to s-expressions, not something that requires a parser like this:

  $ ls -lah /usr/lib/libxml2.so.2.9.8

  -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1,4M mar 27 17:46 /usr/lib/libxml2.so.2.9.8

Re: Parsing JSON is a Minefield

#9

Post by your-nanny » Sun, Apr 22, 2018, 6:24 PM UTC

Doing God's work, man. Helluva job

Re: Parsing JSON is a Minefield

#10

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Apr 22, 2018, 6:25 PM UTC

eponeponepon wrote: post #4

This is the one thing that the JSON-against-XML holy warriors need to understand properly. Yes, JSON's less verbose; yes, it's just "plain text" (in as much as there is such a thing); yes, XML makes you put closing tags in - but if you need reliable parsing and rock-solid specifications (and it's reasonably likely that you do, even if you think you don't...), then XML, for all its faults, is very likely the better wa…

[deleted]