JOjohnny_reilly·Feb 5, 2022Submission
Mind the gap between the train and the platform:)
1 points · Open discussiondouglascrockford
JSON-js
JavaScript2011–2022
douglascrockford / JSON-js
JSON-js
JSON in JavaScript
13Distinct people
13Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
8.7KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
JSON in JavaScript
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
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Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year13 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2011-02-18 02:16:36 UTC to 2022-02-05 08:48:52 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2011 | 2011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2012 | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
13 sourcesI mean, that's certainly a great ideal. The real world is somewhat less-than. I don't fault anyone for having to maintain a legacy codebase developed by people who rolled their own, say, JSON-parsing functions. (If you want to see what this sort of exploit mitigation looks like in practice, see https://github.com/douglascrockford/JSON-js/blob/master/json... ; think that this was the most popular JSON parsing library ever. Thank goodness IE8 is a goner.)
In Executing non-alphanumeric JavaScript without parenthesesThis! ?w=1 has existed for years, with no UI way to access it.
Compare two views of the same commit (found this by searching for any commit on github with the word "indent" in it)
https://github.com/douglascrockford/JSON-js/commit/1e3869cb3... (133 additions and 127 deletions)
https://github.com/douglascrockford/JSON-js/commit/1e3869cb3... (30 additions and 24 deletions)
In More code review toolsDouglas crockford has a solution for this: https://github.com/douglascrockford/JSON-js/blob/master/cycl...
It's proven.. and written by the dude who invented JSON
In Show HN: JSON.stringify (without circular deps) for AngularJS 1.xTo mix things up a bit, I'm going to give two very small examples of code that can be understood quickly, but studied diligently. Both are in JavaScript, which I notice you mention specifically in another comment:
[1] Douglas Crockford's JSON parser. Worth a look because it is excellently commented and is easily understandable https://github.com/douglascrockford/JSON-js/blob/master/json...
[2] Bouncing Beholder. A game written in 1K of highly obfuscated code, which the author expands upon here. Worth it because it teaches some crazy optimisation techniques that are applicable to all programming, but also includes plenty of javascript-specific trickery. http://marijnhaverbeke.nl/js1k/
In Ask HN: What source code is worth studying?Several comments mention the "Software shall be used for Good, not Evil" licensing issue in the JSON code from json.org.
The original json.js file from json.org had this copyright and license:
Copyright (c) 2005 JSON.org
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WAR
Read the rest
RANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.
http://web.archive.org/web/20060226161035/http://www.json.or...
This was a standard MIT license with one change:
"This license uses the Expat [MIT] license as a base, but adds a clause mandating: “The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.” This is a restriction on usage and thus conflicts with freedom 0. The restriction might be unenforcible [sic], but we cannot presume that. Thus, the license is nonfree."
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#JSON
However, the current versions of json.js and json2.js on GitHub contain only this public domain dedication and disclaimer:
Public Domain.
NO WARRANTY EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED. USE AT YOUR OWN RISK.
https://github.com/douglascrockford/JSON-js/blob/master/json...
So it's no longer an issue. You can feel free to use json2.js for good or evil.
First of all, if native JSON parsing exists, jQuery will use that.
The validation code they use in case there is no native JSON implementation available is borrowed from Douglas Crockford's json2.js ( https://github.com/douglascrockford/JSON-js/blob/master/json... ) which was the inspiration for the native JSON implementations and should really be correct by now, both in terms of correctness but also circumventing regexp weaknesses in some engines.
In Json ⊄ jsCrockford also developed a standard for JSON [1] and actively participates in maintaining it. [2]
[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4627
[2] https://github.com/douglascrockford/JSON-js/commits/master
In Markdown: The Spec - it's coming and it's full of personalitiesOn issue 28, it says that when you do
JSON.stringify(Object('hi'))
The issue reporter says it should return '"hi"' but returns '{"0":"h","1":"i"}'
In my JS console, if I do
Object('hi')
It returns { '0': 'h', '1': 'i' }
So to me, it looks like JSON2 correctly serializes the result of Object('hi'). Am I missing something?
https://github.com/douglascrockford/JSON-js/issues/28
In JSON 3: A modern JSON polyfill compatible with nearly all JavaScript platforms.You can use Douglas Crockford cycle tools in order to deal with this.
https://github.com/douglascrockford/JSON-js/blob/master/cycl...
As the only way to know if an object has already been visited is in linear time in Javascript, it makes cycle detection a O(n^2) process. This is way too costly to add by default unfortunately.
In URL Object Notation: A better JSON for URLsYes! I was shocked to see him recommend the use of a straight eval for parsing JSON.
json2.js is a must! JSON.parse and JSON.stringify are your friends.
https://github.com/douglascrockford/JSON-js/blob/master/json...
In Why is JSON so popular? Developers want out of the syntax businessThe JSON reference implementation [1] does this with JSON.stringify.
[1] https://github.com/douglascrockford/JSON-js
In Ask HN: Library to pretty print JSON?Sure.
-- The 'request' module --
is mixing concerns (network protocol, caching, serialization, model) that you probably don't want to mix that way in a real app.
It's pretty trivial to roll the polling part yourself (setTimeout), if you really need a plugin then PeriodicalUpdater[1] might be a candidate (although there are many others, and the cool kids use comet/websocket now anyways).
I didn't quite understand the purpose of the caching part; the browser already caches for us after all. It seems like a misnomer for some sort of bridge to the localstorage, but I didn't quite get in what situation storing the verbatim server response would be useful - as opposed to storing the deserialized result (or part thereof).
Anyways for the serialization part JSON2.js[2] is your friend.
And for models there are various choices, backbone.js[3] being
Read the rest
the most popular recently.
-- The 'store' module --
doesn't seem to provide anything interesting over jq-store[4]. And if you really want your data to stick around then there's evercookie[5]
-- The 'pubsub' module --
was a little hard for me to understand the purpose of.
Since it isn't actually about server messaging(?) but rather only a way of passing events inside the browser it seems like what you'd really want is either JavascriptMVC[6], Backbone[3], perhaps knockout[7], or the older chain.js[8], or maybe one of the other two dozen data binding plugins.
Admittedly on this last one I may very well just be missing the point entirely. PubSub inside the browser? Huh?
[1] https://github.com/RobertFischer/JQuery-PeriodicalUpdater
[2] https://github.com/douglascrockford/JSON-js
[3] http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/
[4] http://medialize.github.com/jQuery-store/
[5] http://samy.pl/evercookie/
[6] http://www.javascriptmvc.com/
[7] http://knockoutjs.com/
[8] http://ajaxian.com/archives/chainjs-jquery-data-binding-service