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JSON Patch

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299 points DataOverload | 3 comments | 17 Oct 24 17:46 UTC | HN request time: 0.446s | 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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Guthur ◴[18 Oct 24 19:09 UTC] No.41882491[source]▶
JSON is derived from JavaScript, it is not a strict subset.

The most glaring issue is JSON number type versus JavaScript float. This causes issues in both directions whereby people consistently believe JSON can't represent numbers outside the float range and in addition JSON has no way to represent NaN.

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1. bsimpson ◴[18 Oct 24 19:20 UTC] No.41882582[source]▶
Is there any legal JSON that's not legal JavaScript?

If not, it's fair to say it's a subset.

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2. tubthumper8 ◴[18 Oct 24 19:38 UTC] No.41882750[source]▶
It is a subset as of JavaScript edition ES2019, when JavaScript strings are now allowed to contain U+2028 LINE SEPARATOR and U+2029 PARAGRAPH SEPARATOR. Prior to ES2019, that was the only known example of legal JSON that was not legal JavaScript
3. fanf2 ◴[18 Oct 24 19:46 UTC] No.41882831[source]▶
JavaScript used to forbid U+2028 line separator and U+2029 paragraph separator in string literals, but JavaScript now allows them for compatibility with JSON.

The remaining wrinkle is different handling of "__proto__"