WorkJSON is the JSON format extended with commonly requested features needed for getting real work done:
- Optional trailing commas on arrays and objects
- C++ single and multline comments
Backtickmultiline strings- Explicit plus sign permitted on numbers
- Numbers with bare leading or trailing decimal
- NaN, Infinity, -Infinity
- Hexadecimal numbers
- Optional unquoted object keys (using [A-Za-z_0-9]+ characters only)
You can use WorkJSON as a parser only in order to make your program more robust to slightly malformed JSON input. Or you can use it as both a parser and writer to make your program better able to represent numeric constants while staying close enough to vanilla JSON for most editors and tools to work well.
This repo contains single-file JavaScript and Python drop-in replacements for the system JSON libraries. The JavaScript version is only 2 kB when minified.
The WorkJSON parser is 100% backwards compatible to vanilla JSON parsers as long as your input has no characters in the Unicode private use area \uE000 through \uF8FF.
The output of the WorkJSON writer is backwards compatible to vanilla JSON as long as you don't use NaN or Infinity values, which standard JSON writers cannot process anyway.
The implementation is designed to use only regexps and a vanilla JSON parser to simplify porting and minimize code size.
The current version does not support unescaped double quotes within single-quoted or multiline strings.
You can support WorkJSON, Markdeep, and my other open source projects by sponsoring my github account.
WorkJSON was originally released in the quadplay fantasy console as "BetterJSON". Since there is an older npm package by that name, I renamed my library to WorkJSON to avoid a collision.
WorkJSON is similar to JSON5 but is about 10x smaller. The primary difference is that WorkJSON intentionally does not support unicode in unquoted keys.
YAML is a markdown-like superset of JSON. WorkJSON is compatible with YAML. It is generally a better format than JSON, but many projects, I choose the lighter weight and more widely supported JSON ecosystem, using WorkJSON to remove the rough edges of JSON.
WorkJSON is by Morgan McGuire (@CasualEffects) and is available under the MIT license.