JSON in Practice

Writing JSON:

I wrote a specific-purpose JSON writer, in Ruby, to encode the data I needed. It wasn't too tough:

# JSON to send to webdialog
def makeJson( layer_names, scene_names, vis ) 
 ret = '{ '
 ret += 'layers:' + makeJsonArr( layer_names )
 ret += ', scenes:' + makeJsonArr( scene_names )
 ret += ', vis:\"' + vis + '\"'
 ret += ' }'
 return ret
end

# convert array of names to JSON array
def makeJsonArr( names )
 ret = '[ '
 start = true
 names.each do |n|
  unless start
   ret += ', '
  else
   start = false
  end
  ret += '\"' + n + '\"'   
 end
 ret += ' ]'
 return ret
end

Reading JSON:

Since JSON is syntactically correct JavaScript, this is the reader that decodes it in JavaScript:

function rubySays( data ) {
 eval( 'obj = ' + data );

The rubySays() method then goes on to make use of the object it creates in its first line. I like code that weighs in at just tens of bytes.

Summary:

Writing JSON is easy. Reading JSON in JavaScript is effortless. Highly recommended!