Thank you Rony. 👏
I have had to use terrible kludges to get over the otherwise remarkably
usable JSON class's habit of turning JSON booleans into ooRexx booleans.
This will be a great boon.
+1 to adding this to the language proper.
Jon
On Thu, 2 Feb 2023 at 12:37, Rony G. Flatscher <rony.flatsc...@wu.ac.at>
wrote:
> "json.cls" as distributed with ooRexx 5.0.0 has one (actually two)
> limitation which can be regarded to be a bug:
>
> - It cannot handle JSON booleans properly: when reading a JSON file
> with boolean values and creating a JSON file from ooRexx the boolean values
> will not show up, rather their ooRexx numeric representations of "0" and
> "1".
>
> In the past I came up with a solution for this problem which was not
> "liked" and was 30% slower than json.cls (sounds dramatic, but in today's
> world with such power horses in the hands of end-users may be negligeable,
> but still, one being made aware of this made it less attractive).
>
> As the above limitation is really a problem if one wants to use ooRexx
> json.cls and exchange proper JSON with other systems, e.g. via curl, I came
> up with a version (starting out with the current json.cls) that does the
> following in addition:
>
> - It adds support for JSON true and false: just send .json~true or
> .json~false. The resulting JsonBoolean objects behave like ooRexx .true and
> .false (both strings with the numeric values "0" and "1") and can be used
> interchangeably
>
> - when reading a JSON file, JSON booleans will be represented with the
> appropriate .json~true or .json~false values
>
> - when writing a JSON file, any JSON boolean value will be properly
> encoded with "false" and "true"
>
> - It adds generic support for MapCollection and OrderedCollection
> instead of restricting support to Directory and Array,
>
> - It uses StringTable instead of Directory for reading in JSON data,
>
> - Although JSON is a string encoding, which could be read by humans,
> there are two observable properties that do not make it human-friendly:
>
> - by default the encoding is "minimized" such that no ignorable
> whitespace (usually used for making JSON better legible e.g. cf.
> Wikipedia's JSON [1] sample) is contained,
>
> - there is no sorted order of name/value pairs (per specification
> no order is implied, yet for humans having a sorted order in the JSON
> encoded data makes it possible to quickly check whether certain
> name/values
> pairs exist or not without affecting any JSON importer)
>
> the replacement version will create by default minimized JSON encodings,
> however it will sort name/value pairs by name to ease reading by humans
>
>
> - as this is Rexx/ooRexx it is made possible to create a "legible", a
> "human-oriented" JSON encoding in two ways: when creating a JSON instance
> or when sending the toJson message one can supply .true which causes the
> produced JSON encoding to be formatted with ignorable whitespace such that
> it will be easy to see the structure and spot name/value pairs therein;
> yet, the produced JSON is still JSON and can be processed without problems,
>
> - two new convenience class methods for reading from and writing to
> files are defined: fromJsonFile(fileName) and toJsonFile(fileName,
> ooRexxObject [, legible=.true])
>
> Here the JSON sample given at [1]:
>
> { "firstName": "John", "lastName": "Smith", "isAlive": true, "age": 27,
> "address": { "streetAddress": "21 2nd Street", "city": "New York",
> "state": "NY", "postalCode": "10021-3100" }, "phoneNumbers": [ {
> "type": "home", "number": "212 555-1234" }, { "type":
> "office", "number": "646 555-4567" } ], "children": [
> "Catherine", "Thomas", "Trevor" ], "spouse": null}
>
> Here the minimized rendering with the replacement version of json.cls:
>
> {"address":{"city":"New
> York","postalCode":"10021-3100","state":"NY","streetAddress":"21 2nd
> Street"},"age":27,"children":["Catherine","Thomas","Trevor"],"firstName":"John","isAlive":true,"lastName":"Smith","phoneNumbers":[{"number":"212
> 555-1234","type":"home"},{"number":"646
> 555-4567","type":"office"}],"spouse":null}
>
> Here the legible rendering with the replacement version of json.cls:
>
> {
> "address": {
> "city": "New York",
> "postalCode": "10021-3100",
> "state": "NY",
> "streetAddress": "21 2nd Street"
> },
> "age": 27,
> "children": [
> "Catherine",
> "Thomas",
> "Trevor"
> ],
> "firstName": "John",
> "isAlive": true,
> "lastName": "Smith",
> "phoneNumbers": [
> {
> "number": "212 555-1234",
> "type": "home"
> },
> {
> "number": "646 555-4567",
> "type": "office"
> }
> ],
> "spouse": null
> }
>
> ---
>
> Here an ooRexx program that creates a structure which will get encoded as
> minimized and legible JSON:
>
> -- create a Rexx structure
> d=.directory~new
> d["firstName"] = "Mary"
> d["lastName" ] = "Doe"
> d["children" ] = .list~of("Maribel", "John", "Annabel")
> d["married" ] = .json~false
> d["born" ] = "2001-02-02"
> d["yearBorn" ] = 2001
> d["bestMan" ] = .nil
>
> j = .json~new
> say j~toJson(d) -- write minimized JSON
> say "---"
> say j~toJson(d,.true) -- write legible JSON
>
> ::requires "json.cls" -- get access to the JSON class
>
> Here the output of the above program:
>
> {"bestMan":null,"born":"2001-02-02","children":["Maribel","John","Annabel"],"firstName":"Mary","lastName":"Doe","married":false,"yearBorn":2001}
> ---
> {
> "bestMan": null,
> "born": "2001-02-02",
> "children": [
> "Maribel",
> "John",
> "Annabel"
> ],
> "firstName": "Mary",
> "lastName": "Doe",
> "married": false,
> "yearBorn": 2001
> }
>
> ---
>
> The replacement json.cls and the adjusted official json.tesgroup can be
> found in my sandbox at
> <https://sourceforge.net/p/oorexx/code-0/HEAD/tree/sandbox/rony/json/>
> <https://sourceforge.net/p/oorexx/code-0/HEAD/tree/sandbox/rony/json/>.
>
> Performance when reading and writing is comparable to 5.0's json.cls.
> ---rony
>
> [1] Wikipedia JSON: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON>
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON>
>
>
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