Parsing JSON is a Minefield

Re:Parsing JSON is a Minefield by Annatar on Monday April 23, 2018 @07:30AM (#16902405)

Shell and AWK programs have fewest dependencies, are extremely light on resources’ consumption and are extremely fast. When someone’s program emits JSON because the author assumed that programs which ingest that data will also be JavaScript programs, that’s a really bad assumption. It would force the consumer of that data to replicate the environment. This goes against core UNIX principles, as discussed at length in “The art of UNIX programming” book. It’s a rookie mistake to make.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Parsing JSON is a Minefield by nnq on Monday April 23, 2018 @08:37AM (#16902821)

> It would force the consumer of that data to replicate the environment.

It won't, because JSON is a standard. Imperfect like all standards but practically good enough. And "plain text" just means "an undefined syntax that I have to mostly guess". And nobody "programs" in bash or awk anymore. The "standard scripting languages" for all sane devs are Python or Ruby (and some Perl legacy) and parsing JSON in them is trivial.

The "UNIX philosophy" was a cancerous bad idea anyway and now it's thankfully being eaten alive by its own children, so time to... rejoice?!

EDIT+: Also, if I feel truly lazy/evil (like in "something I'll only in this JS project"), I would use something much much less standard than JSON, like JSON-5 (https://github.com/json5/json5), which will practically truly force all consumers to use JS :P

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Parsing JSON is a Minefield by fao_ on Monday April 23, 2018 @03:40PM (#16906700)

The standard for plain text output in the terminal is and has always been TSV.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Parsing JSON is a Minefield by nnq on Wednesday April 25, 2018 @04:03AM (#16919430)

...and how does one do nested/tree-like data in TSV? One doesn't, only just ad-hoc invents something akin to sexps or json but unstandardized. Real-world data rarely has a natural fit for "tabl

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Parsing JSON is a Minefield by fao_ on Wednesday May 02, 2018 @01:14PM (#16979061)

How many standard UNIX programs do you know that output tree data?

And almost always you can find an alternative to non-tree-based representation without having to reinvent sexprs. Look at how ps represents the process tree, for example.

[ Parent | on HN ]