Adding-comments-in-JSON.txt

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Adding comments in JSON // Добавяне на коментари в/към JSON
A compilation summary from other sources by https://github.com/sahwar/Bulogos
02:07 EEST - 20 April 2020
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1. How to add comments in JSON pre-JSONv5:

SOURCES:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/244777/can-comments-be-used-in-json
https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-write-comments-inside-a-JSON-document
https://commentjson.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
https://tecadmin.net/comments-in-json/
https://coderwall.com/p/pxkbfa/adding-comments-to-json
https://www.oreilly.com/content/adding-comments-in-json/
https://www.w3schools.com/js/js_comments.asp
https://www.w3schools.com/js/js_json_syntax.asp
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/244777/can-comments-be-used-in-json/50930429#50930429
https://www.google.com/search?&q=json+comments+syntax&channel=trow2

..., etc.

https://gist.github.com/MoOx/5271067 (+ the comments there)

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 MoOx/comments-trick.json
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How to make comment in JSON file
comments-trick.json
{
    "//field": "These 'double quote' 'double quote' are used as comments, because JSON doesnt' allow comment",
    "field": {},
    "#another-field": "Another comment",
    "another-field": {},
    "/*stuff": "Be careful to use them when you have full control of the content :)",
    "stuff": [],
    "bla": "bla"
}
@usrrname
usrrname commented on 2 Feb 2018

Aww damn! I landed on this page from a google search looking for an easy workaround
@VishwaJay
VishwaJay commented on 22 Apr 2018 •

Another way, if you have a context checker that doesn't allow empty quote strings for declarations:

{
    "_comment":  "Comments with // or /**/ are NEVER used in a JSON file!!!",
    "regulardata": "stuff"
}

Hope that helps. Just have your processing code lack processing for it, and it works fine.
@twome
twome commented on 15 Dec 2018

JSON (& strictly-linted JS) don't allow duplicate keys of objects, so add a unique letter or number to make it validate. This is a trick I've seen somewhere in popular code but can't remember where, sorry. I think the convention of using a "//" as the basis for comment names seems fairly sensible & terse, and should make it easy to programmatically update current JSON configs to some better format in future.

{
    "//a": "This is the first comment."
    "//b": "...and this is the second." 
}

@nikesh9220
nikesh9220 commented on 24 Jan 2019

The JSON should all be data, and if you include a comment, then it will be data too.

You could have a designated data element called "_comment" (or something) that would be ignored by apps that use the JSON data.

You would probably be better having the comment in the processes that generates/receives the JSON, as they are supposed to know what the JSON data will be in advance, or at least the structure of it.

{
"_comment": "comment text goes here...",
"Key":"value"
}
@lsloan
lsloan commented on 5 Jun 2019

@twome's comment here is the best suggestion. I'd give it a +1 if I could!
@volandku
volandku commented on 20 Nov 2019

nothing works in php (json_decode) - all comments are still in data
@MoOx
Owner Author
MoOx commented on 20 Nov 2019

Yeah because it's a trick, not real comment. JSON specs just don't have comments...
@LarsHLunde
LarsHLunde commented on 23 Jan •

None of these is how I would have done it,
I would have gone for something like this instead:

{
    "Comments": [
        "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,",
        "consectetur adipiscing elit.",
        "Suspendisse vitae risus ligula.",
        "Fusce vel urna turpis."
    ]
}

Then you won't have to think about making identifiers for every line, and it validates.
@lurkie
lurkie commented on 10 Feb

JSON 5 (https://json5.org/) does support comments. However, support for it is limited. E.g. PHP does not support it yet.
@mbaetaoliveira
mbaetaoliveira commented on 17 Mar

You can use:

/*
{
"Comments": [
"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet,",
"consectetur adipiscing elit.",
"Suspendisse vitae risus ligula.",
"Fusce vel urna turpis."
]
}
*/

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2. How to add comments in JSON5:

SOURCES:
JSON5 — JSON for humans: http://json5.org/
https://spec.json5.org/ 
https://spec.json5.org/#comments

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Example (Informative)

// This is a single line comment.

/* This is a multi-
   line comment. */

8White Space

White space may appear before and after any JSON5Token.
Table 3: White space
Code Points	Description
U+0009	Horizontal tab
U+000A	Line feed
U+000B	Vertical tab
U+000C	Form feed
U+000D	Carriage return
U+0020	Space
U+00A0	Non-breaking space
U+2028	Line separator
U+2029	Paragraph separator
U+FEFF	Byte order mark
Unicode Zs category	Any other character in the Space Separator Unicode category

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3. Alternatives to hacks/tricks to adding comments in JSON & 
alternatives to JSON5

YAML = https://yaml.org/ & https://github.com/yaml/www.yaml.org
HAML
.ini files, .config files, etc. ; Also check out: .netrc, .vimrc, # EditorConfig is awesome: http://EditorConfig.org
TOML = https://github.com/toml-lang/toml
JSONP.php = https://www.highcharts.com/samples/data/jsonp.php?filename=aapl-c.json&callback=
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSONP
https://github.com/sindresorhus/strip-json-comments = Write sorta invalid-JSON-with-comments, then use this to just remove the comments for production-use JSON files...
JSON fork with comments = https://github.com/eyalev/jsoc
https://hjson.github.io/ & https://github.com/hjson/hjson = Hjson, a user interface for JSON
https://github.com/garycourt/JSV
https://github.com/open-source-parsers/jsoncpp
Parse JSON with comments: https://www.npmjs.com/package/jsonc
https://github.com/onury/jsonc
https://jsonlint.com/
https://github.com/circlecell/jsonlint.com
https://github.com/zaach/jsonlint


Remove comments from JSON (MAY BE BROKEN, test it before production): https://gist.github.com/WizKid/1170297

https://github.com/getify/JSON.minify
https://github.com/getify/JSON.minify/blob/master/minify_json.py
https://github.com/getify/JSON.minify/commit/f626f3dbe343321e019a1f176107d48fd94f33ae
https://github.com/getify/JSON.minify/commit/f626f3dbe343321e019a1f176107d48fd94f33ae#diff-d437a64a5901ee0232b3ba2fc7edff7a

And, ugh, XML & SGML... but those are less human-friendly to read and longer 
than JSON, HAML, TOML, JSONP, _BUT_ XML is better in some other cases!

http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/ECMA-404.pdf

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