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JSON Patch

(zuplo.com)
299 points DataOverload | 1 comments | 17 Oct 24 17:46 UTC | HN request time: 0.203s | 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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ks2048 ◴[18 Oct 24 20:41 UTC] No.41883303[source]▶
I agree "." would make more sense than "/".

I actually think an array would be better, ["foo","bar"] for "foo.bar". How many many bugs are introduced by people not escaping properly? It's more verbose, but judging by the rest of the standard, they don't seem to be emphasizing brevity.

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1. kevincox ◴[19 Oct 24 10:47 UTC] No.41887060[source]▶
Definitely agree on the array. They were smart enough to use JSON for the patch format so that people didn't have to write custom parsers but then used a selector syntax that requires a custom parser (and serializer). It seems like an obvious unforced error.