On Sun, 12 Sep 2010 05:05:09 -0400, Brian Schott <[email protected]> wrote:

Now that a few bugs are fixed in DMD (notably 4826), my improvements to
std.json compile. My primary purpose in this code change is streamlining
the process of creating JSON documents. You can now do stuff like this:

auto json = JSONValue();
json["numbers"] = [1, 3, 5, 7];
json["nullValue"] = null;
json["something"] = false;
json["vector"] = ["x": 234.231, "y" : 12.8, "z" : 35.0];
assert("vector" in json);
json["vector"]["x"] = 42.8;

More example usage:
http://www.hackerpilot.org/src/phobos/jsontest.d

The implementation of the actual JSON data structure and parsing /
writing is unchanged. Ddoc comments were added so that the documentation
page for the module won't be quite so empty.

Implementation:
http://www.hackerpilot.org/src/phobos/json.d

I'd like to get this committed back to Phobos if there's a consensus
that these changes make sense. Comments welcome. (Note: You'll need a
DMD version built from SVN to use this)

- Brian

Hi Brain,
This really belongs on the phobos mailing list as JSON isn't ready for public consumption yet (as far as I know). I would suspect that it even has a decent chance of being dropped in favor of serialization + variant. The implementation has several bugs. First, it doesn't parse Unicode escape sequences correctly (e.g. \u0026). Second, JSON has no integer type. Third, the serializer with certain JSON value inputs will write a JSON file that can not be read by the parser. It's also missing some key features, like output range and human readable output support. The design is very C-ish as opposed to D-ish: its composed of a bunch of free functions / types all containing JSON in their name. (i.e. parseJSON). These should all be encapsulated as member functions.

Getting more to the API itself, the reading of a JSON value is a use case that just isn't considered currently. Consider:

// It's relatively simple to write to a JSON value
json["vector"]["x"] = 42.8;

// But reading it...
real x;
if(json["vector"]["x"].type == JSON_TYPE.INTEGER) {
    x = json["vector"]["x"].integer;
} else if(json["vector"]["x"].type == JSON_TYPE.FLOAT) {
    x = json["vector"]["x"].floating;
} else {
    enforceEx!(JSONException)(false);
}

By contrast, this is the API on my personal JSON library:
json.vector.x = 42.8;
auto x = json.vector.x.number;

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