JSON parser fails to parse comments

[Trina]

According to the wiki: "json was chosen because it's mostly human-readable and -writable"

But part of a readable configuration is to add comments for documentation purposes. The transmission JSON parser fails if the settings file contains any comments.

I would suggest looking at using the [ yajl] C library. It's a popular parser used by many projects.

[jordan]

The grammar on www.json.org doesn't define any comments at all, so it's not surprising that JSON_parser.c doesn't handle them.

yajl looks like a good library, but if it allows comments then it's apparently not following the spec.

[Trina]

In Douglas Crockford's [ own words]:

JSON does not have comments. A JSON encoder MUST NOT output comments.
A JSON decoder MAY accept and ignore comments.

And many JSON decoders do indeed parse comments fine.

[jordan]

I'm not going to switch parsers over this issue.

You may want to request this feature upstream to the JSON_parser.c maintainer.

[howl]

A JSON parser based on ​http://www.json.org's JSON_checker code.

Copyright (c) 2007-2010 Jean Gressmann (jean@…).

For license information, see JSON_parser.c.

JSON parser features:

• arbitrary levels of JSON object/array nesting,
• C-style comments,
• UTF-16 & escape sequence (\uXXXX) decoding to UTF-8.
• Manual processing of floating point values.

The parser processes UTF-8 encoded JSON only. JSON object keys and JSON strings are returned as UTF-8 encoded C strings.

In fact JSON_parser.c seems to support comments, watching a sample file at ​http://fara.cs.uni-potsdam.de/~jsg/json_parser/comments.json at least multiline (/*...*/) don't know if single line (/ /...) are parsed right.

The default is to not allow comments, so allow_comments needs to be set to a non-zero value.