jsun

This is an alternative JSON decoder/encoder that supports some extra features. It takes a lot of inspiration from the json module in the standard library and exposes the same high level API: load, loads, dump, dumps, JSONDecoder, and JSONEncoder.

In many cases, jsun can be swapped in by installing the package then simply updating imports to use jsun instead of json.

Extra decoding features

• Trailing commas

• Line comments starting with //

• All valid Python ints and floats:

  • Binary, octal, hex
  • Underscore separators
  • Unary plus operator

• Math constants:

  • inf, nan, E, π, PI, τ, TAU
  • Infinity, NaN

• Literal (unquoted) dates and times:

  • 2021-06
  • 2021-06-23
  • 2021-06-23T12:00
  • 2021-06-23T12:00Z
  • 2021-06-23T12:00-07:00
  • 12:00 (today's date at noon)

• Decoding an empty string will produce None rather than an exception (an exception will be raised if extras are disabled)

• All parsing methods can be overridden if some additional customization is required. In particular, the object and array parsers can be overridden

• A pre-parse method can be provided to handle values before the regular JSON parsers are applied

• A fallback parsing method can be provided to handle additional types of values if none of the default parsers are suitable

• When errors are encountered, specific exceptions are raised (all derived from the built-in ValueError)

Extra encoding features

The jsun encoder is very similar to the standard library encoder (and is in fact a subclass of json.JSONEncoder). Currently, it supports only a couple of extra features:

• Date objects are converted to ISO format by default
• Datetime objects are converted to ISO format by default

NOTE: There is some asymmetry here. E.g., date and datetime objects should be converted to literals instead of quoted strings.

Disabling the extra features

All the extra features can be turned off with a flag:

>>> from jsun import decode
>>> decode("[1, 2, 3,]")
[1, 2, 3]
>>> decode("[1, 2, 3,]", enable_extras=False)
<exception traceback>

Differences between jsun and standard library json

• An empty string input is converted to None rather than raising an exception (only if extras are enabled).

• When decoding, instead of object_hook and object_hook_pairs, there's just a single object_converter argument. It's essentially the same as object_hook. object_hook_pairs seems unnecessary nowadays since dicts are ordered.

• The default object type is jsun.obj.JSONObject instead of dict. A JSONObject is a bucket of properties that can be accessed via dotted or bracket notation. Pass object_converter=None to get back dicts instead.

Config files

A bonus feature is that configuration can be loaded from INI files where the keys are split on dots to create sub-objects and the values are encoded as JSON.

This is quite similar to TOML and some of the features of jsun, like literal dates, are inspired by TOML.

This feature was originally developed in 2014 as part of the django-local-settings project, about a year and half after TOML was first released but before I'd heard of it.

Differences with TOML

• Parentheses are used instead of quotes to avoid splitting on dots
• Objects created using {} syntax (AKA "inline tables" in TOML) can span multiple lines
• There are no arrays of tables
• Others I'm not thinking of at the moment...

About the name

My first choice was jsonish but that's already taken. My second choice was jsonesque but it's also taken, and it's hard to type. jsun is nice because it's easy to type and easy to swap in for json by just changing a single letter.

Testing

There's a suite of unit tests, which also tests against the JSON checker files at https://json.org/JSON_checker/. Coverage is currently at 82%.