Strip JSON Comments

Strips single line // and block /* */ comments from .jsonc text:

echo '[1, /* strip this comment */ 2, 3]' | ./strip-jsonc 
[1,                          2, 3]

Comment characters are replaced with spaces

To preserve line and column locations of the remaining JSON text.

Block comments do not nest

JSONC doesn't have a spec but its block comments have been described as behaving like JavaScript, i.e. they do not nest.

Trailing commas are not removed

Some JSONC parsers support trailing commas, but as strip-jsonc is line-oriented, it does not have an option to remove trailing commas.

Test input

This repo contains a test input file called test.jsonc which exercises the different cases of embedding comments in JSON.

Perl

The strip-jsonc script is written in Perl and designed to be fast and compatible with any version of Perl 5.

Go

There is a golang variant of the strip-jsonc script which has the same behavior as the Perl script but can be 3-4x faster for large inputs. It can be compiled with go build:

go build gostrip-jsonc.go