Wish: Sort Keys

[TobiX]

I'm using Yajl to dump data structures into a readable format for version control. It would be nice if the keys in the JSON output would be sorted to get a stable representation of the data. A option like :pretty would be nice...

[TobiX]

Please see my fork for an implementation...

[brianmario]

Was just taking a look at that, awesome!

[brianmario]

Ok so I pulled down the patch and played with it a bit.
Everything looks good except the sort option used in conjunction with a Hash that has Symbols for keys will fail to sort because the Symbol class doesn't have a <=> method out of the box.
I have a couple of ideas for how to handle that, but I wanted to see what you thought in case this is a use-case you'd need to cover for your own needs as well?

[TobiX]

Since all of my keys are strings, I didn't test that case... A graceful fallback when the keys can't be sorted would be nice.

[TobiX]

Another case that fails are mixed keys (Strings and Fixnum and Symbols)...

Since I don't have any strong opinion about the "correct" sort order, how about something in the spirit of this:

a.sort_by {|x| [x.class.to_s, (x.respond_to? :to_s)? x.to_s : x.inspect]}

This would group keys by their class and sort them by some kind of string representation, falling back to ".inspect" if there is no to_s defined...

[brianmario]

I've come to the conclusion that the solution for this would be too use-case-specific to put in the core library itself. I may reconsider in the future, but I'm closing this ticket for now.