[RFC] Switch to JSON

[digama0]

The concrete syntax of the export format is troublesome to parse, being a homegrown textual format with a heavy reliance on newline separators and with lots of "clever" sequence encodings. Moreover, the encoding of names is unquoted, which is just plain wrong in the presence of names with escaped characters, because these names can include arbitrary characters, including newlines, keywords and everything else - a classic SQL injection attack.

I propose we drop this ad hoc encoding entirely and switch to a JSON-based format. This is much easier to get right, and libraries for doing the parsing are numerous (but it's also feasible to write the parser directly).

[ammkrn]

Fwiw I'm not opposed to the idea; while the current format is really easy to write a parser for, JSON would certainly be more accessible for people/projects that don't want to write a parser in the first place. I haven't looked deeply into the name escaping issue yet, but I'll take your word for it that it's a potential source of problems.

I'm interested to see what you come up with.