Fixing JSON

Just use yaml?

Or if you still want something easy to parse, s-expressions.

Could you please elaborate? I'm vaguely familiar with S-expressions from my cursory inquiry into lisp (planning to take the plunge in November), but I don't see how they can be applied in this context.

S-expresions are really just a way of representing a tree of data (in Lisp code, the S-expression literally represents the abstract syntax tree that is used for the code).

Take the JSON example:

    {
      "IDs": [116, 943, 234, 38793],
      "Settings": { "Aperture": 2.8, "Shutter speed": "1/250" }
    }

You could rewrite this as an S-expression as:

    ((IDs (116 943 234 3879))
     (Settings
       (Aperture 2.8)
       ("Shutter Speed" "1/250")))

YAML is not as simple as one might think. The spec[1] is 80 pages long after all...

1: http://yaml.org/spec/1.2/spec.pdf

I feel like YAML might be a bit to complicated in the other direction, with many ways of encoding quite complex things and the connected risk for bugs. (E.g. the Python-binding, pyYAML, can't even read its own output correctly in all cases)

Thanks! I figured it would be simple, and indeed it was :)