W2271 JSON FILES

Within these castle walls be forged Mavens of Computer Science ...

— Merlin, The Coder

What is JSON?

 This article can be improved by:  Emphasizing in italics important concepts, e.g. open standard method of storing, sending, and retrieving data

JSON or Javascript Object Notation is a text-based language-independent data-interchange format very similar to XML or YAML. Although JSON can be used with almost every major coding language, JSON wouldn’t be correctly classified as a “programming language” per se, rather it’s a text-based open standard method of storing, sending, and retrieving data between a client and server. JSON is a very important data representation format, as it is widely used to facilitate the majority of web-based API calls and is very common in facilitating communication between servers and clients in a wide array of applications.

What is the motivation for learning JSON?

There are several reasons learning JSON can be beneficial for developers, especially those early in their coding career. First off, learning JSON gives developers an easy path to working with a multitude of web-based applications and services that are written in Javascript. Since JSON is a superset of JavaScript, anything you write in JSON can be interpreted by JaveScript compliers, lowering the barrier for entry to working with Javascript-based applications and services. Furthermore, since JSON is a text-only data-interchange format, it is intuitive and the intention of a snippet of JSON can be interpreted easily. Further, nearly every major coding language today has a JSON library allowing JSON to be injected and interpreted by compliers independent of the coding language you wish to write in.

Using JSON with JavaScript

Converting JSON to Javascript is quite easy. In fact, there are a series of Javascript functions that can be called to parse JSON into a Javascript object.

With JSON.parse(), for instance, developers can input a JSON string and parse the text into a Javascript object.

'{"name":"Bob", "age":20, "city":"Phoenix"}'

Using the JSON.parse() function, one can simply pass the JSON to the function as follows:

const obj = JSON.parse('{"name":"Bob", "age":20, "city":"Phoenix"}');

By doing so, JSON.parse() will create a Javascript object, in this case, a const type object called obj to how the JSON values in a Javascript JSON format.

Next, using the JSON.stringify() function, the object created via the JSON text using JSON.parse() can be converted to a string.

const obj = {name: "Bob", age: 20, city: "Phoenix"};

Again, results in a const type object with the given values. And now, that object can be converted to a string.

const myJSON = JSON.stringify(obj);