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JSON Patch

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299 points DataOverload | 5 comments | 17 Oct 24 17:46 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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bsimpson ◴[18 Oct 24 17:02 UTC] No.41881312[source]▶
`/` is a weird choice of delimiter for JSON.

Since JSON is a subset of JS, I would have expected `.` to be the delimiter. That jives with how people think of JSON structures in code. (Python does require bracket syntax for traversing JSON, but even pandas uses dots when you generate a dataframe from JSON.)

When I see `/`, I think:

- "This spec must have been written by backend people," and

- "I wonder if there's some relative/absolute path ambiguity they're trying to solve by making all the paths URLs."

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bityard ◴[18 Oct 24 17:29 UTC] No.41881605[source]▶
Maybe we're talking about different things, but resources in REST are identified by their URL and URLs use '/' to separate elements in the path.
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bsimpson ◴[18 Oct 24 17:58 UTC] No.41881871[source]▶
Yeah, but nobody ever looked at

    {
      "a": {
        "b": {
          "c": []
        }
      }
    }
and thought "I need the list at /a/b/c"
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1. maxbond ◴[18 Oct 24 18:16 UTC] No.41882009[source]▶
Seems like a reasonable thing to me.

    {
      "makes": {
        "toyota": {
          "models: [ ... ]
        }
      }
    }
"I need all the models of Toyota cars."

Or

"Toyota came out with a new Camry, I need to update the Camry object within Toyota's models."

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2. bsimpson ◴[18 Oct 24 18:38 UTC] No.41882225[source]▶
Yeah, but that's makes.toyota.models, not /makes/toyota/models.

The point is that this is a data structure and not a web server. It's using a convention from one domain in a different one. Relatively minor in the scope of possible quibbles, but it's just one more thing to remember/one more trivial mistake to make. I'm sure much collective time will be lost to many people using dots where the spec says to use slashes, and not realizing it because it looks right in every other context with dots. Dots also makes copy/pasting easier, because you wouldn't have to migrate the format after pasting.

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3. maxbond ◴[18 Oct 24 18:45 UTC] No.41882298[source]▶
Oh I see what you mean. I misunderstood, I also don't like slash as a separator.
4. inkyoto ◴[18 Oct 24 23:10 UTC] No.41884316[source]▶
It quickly gets convoluted since Camry has been produced for more than 30 years with regular model refreshes throughout the years, e.g. 1997, 2003, 2025 etc. JSON Pointer quickly falls short since we now require a selection expression to figure out which year model we need to update in the array of models: «makes.toyota.models[?year == `2025`]» (using JMESPath).

Both, JSONPath or JMESPath, support query expressions whereas JSON Pointer does not.

5. diggan ◴[19 Oct 24 10:22 UTC] No.41886932[source]▶
> The point is that this is a data structure and not a web server.

URIs are not only used on web servers though, they're all over the place, probably most notable your filesystem is using `/` as a path separator, so it wouldn't be completely out of place to use it as a path separator elsewhere.