NAME

Note: This is a fork of the abandoned CPAN version by Miko O'Sullivan. I forked it for my own purposes. If it is useful for you, enjoy and participate!

Relaxed JSON?

There's been increasing support for the idea of expanding JSON to improve human-readability. "Relaxed" JSON (RJSON) is a term that has been used to describe a JSON-ish format that has some human-friendly features that JSON doesn't. Most notably, RJSON allows the use of JavaScript-like comments and eliminates the need to quote all keys and values. An (official) specification can be found on RelaxedJSON.org.

Note that by definition every JSON document is also a valid RJSON document.

SYNOPSIS

use JSON::Relaxed;

# Some raw RJSON data.
my $rjson = <<'RAW_DATA';
/* Javascript-like comments. */
{
    // Keys do not require quotes.
    // Single, double and backtick quotes.
    a : 'Larry',
    b : "Curly",
    c : `Phoey`,
    // Simple values do not require quotes.
    d:  unquoted

    // Nested structures.
    e: [
      { a:1, b:2 },
    ],

    // Like Perl, trailing commas are allowed.
    f: "more stuff",
}
RAW_DATA

# Functional parsing.
my $hash = decode_rjson($rjson);

# Object-oriented parsing.
my $parser = JSON::Relaxed->new();
$hash = $parser->decode($rjson);

# Pretty output.
print encode_json( data => $hash, pretty => 1 );

DESCRIPTION

JSON::Relaxed is a lightweight parser and serializer for RJSON. It is fully compliant to the RelaxedJSON.org specification.

EXTENSIONS

Extensions can be disabled with the strict option.

• Hash keys without values

  JSON::Relaxed supports object keys without a specified value. In that case the hash element is simply assigned the undefined value.

  In the following example, a is assigned 1, and b is assigned undef:

  { a:1, b }
  

• Implied outer hash braces

  If the input starts with a hash key, the outer braces are implied. The following are identical

  a : 1
  b : 2
  
  { a : 1, b : 2 }
  

• Optional colon for hash-valued keys

  If a key is associated with a hash value, the colon may be left out. The following are identical

  a { b : 1 }
  
  a : { b : 1 }
  

• Combined hash keys

  Multiple levels of keys, separated by periods. The following are identical

  a.b.c : 1
  
  a : { b : { c : 1 } }
  

  This even works for arrays, but can be tricky:

  a.2.c : 1
  
  a [ null, null, { c : 1 } ]
  

  But

  a.2.c : 1
  a.1.d : 2
  
  a [ null, { d : 2 }, { c : 1 } ]
  

• String continuation

  Long strings can be split over multiple lines by putting a backslash at the end of the line:

  "this is a " \
  "long string"
  

  Note that this is different from

  "this is a \
  long string"
  

  which embeds the newline into the string.

• Extended Unicode escapes

  Unicode escapes in strings may contain an arbitrary number of hexadecimal digits enclosed in braces:

  \u{1d10e}
  

  This eliminates the need to use surrogates to obtain the same character:

  \uD834\uDD0E
  

SUBROUTINES

decode_rjson

$structure = decode_rjson($data)

decode_rjson() is the simple way to parse an RJSON string. It is exported by default. decode_rjson takes a single parameter, the string to be parsed.

Optionally an additional hash with options can be passed to change the behaviour of the parser. See Object-oriented parsing in JSON::Relaxed::Parser.

$structure = decode_rjson( $rjson, %options );

encode_json

encode_json produces a formatted string from a Perl data structure. It takes a hash as argument.

$string = encode_json( data => $struct, %options )

Possible options are

• strict

  If set to a true value, the formatted string will conform to strict Relaxed JSON.

• pretty

  The result will be pretty-printed, i.e. nicely formatted for human eyes.

• schema

  If this argument is provided it must be the result from parsing a valid JSON Schema that is associated with the data to be formatted. The "description" nodes from the schema will be used to provide comments in the output.

METHODS

new

To parse using an object, create a JSON::Relaxed object:

$parser = JSON::Relaxed->new();

Then call the parser's decode method, passing in the RJSON string:

$structure = $parser->decode($rjson);

Similar for encoding:

$string = $parser->encode( data => $structure );

For more details, see Object-oriented parsing in JSON::Relaxed.

ERROR HANDLING

If the document cannot be parsed, JSON::Relaxed returns an undefined value and sets error indicators in $JSON::Relaxed::Parser::err_id and $JSON::Relaxed::Parser::err_msg. For a full list of error codes, see JSON::Relaxed::ErrorCodes.

COMPATIBILITY WITH PRE-0.05 VERSION

The old static method from_rjson has been renamed to decode_rjson, to conform to many other modules of this kind. from_rjson is kept as a synonym for decode_rjson.

For the same reason, the old parser method parse has been renamed to decode. parse is kept as a synonym for decode.

AUTHOR

Johan Vromans jv@cpan.org

Miko O'Sullivan miko@idocs.com, original version.

SUPPORT

Development of this module takes place on GitHub: https://github.com/sciurius/perl-JSON-Relaxed.

You can find documentation for this module with the perldoc command.

perldoc JSON::Relaxed

Please report any bugs or feature requests using the issue tracker on GitHub.

LICENSE

Copyright (c) 2024 by Johan Vromans. All rights reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. This software comes with NO WARRANTY of any kind.

Original copyright 2014 by Miko O'Sullivan. All rights reserved. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. This software comes with NO WARRANTY of any kind.