Newsgroups: php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.internals:113239
To: internals@lists.php.net
References: <CAEdBVicUmhQO3Np8ZFDQi6q0Lkop-Baxo3sECp0ky07NCWB=ow@mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <780576d4-f4a3-756e-2525-9744119006e3@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 23 Feb 2021 18:46:45 +0000
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:78.0) Gecko/20100101
 Thunderbird/78.7.1
MIME-Version: 1.0
In-Reply-To: <CAEdBVicUmhQO3Np8ZFDQi6q0Lkop-Baxo3sECp0ky07NCWB=ow@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Content-Language: en-GB
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Support JSON With Commas and Comments (JWCC) in
 json_decode
From: rowan.collins@gmail.com (Rowan Tommins)

On 23/02/2021 18:21, Pavel Djundik via internals wrote:
> See https://nigeltao.github.io/blog/2021/json-with-commas-comments.html
> for more information.
>
> It is quite common to have trailing commas in JSON, and a lot of
> parsers support it. I believe this could be trivially supported by
> PHP, even if you skip adding support for comments.


This is certainly one of the more reasonable proposals for extended JSON 
I've seen - much better than throwing the kitchen sink at it like JSON5, 
for instance.

However, as that page makes clear, there are dozens of similar proposals 
out there, so I'm not sold on why PHP should jump on this particular 
one. It's not clear who is currently using it, or if there's actually a 
formal definition outside that article.


> Perhaps this could be disabled by default and made opt-in with a
> option flag? json_decode already supports passing in options.


The risk is that this opens the gate for a complex set of "quirks flags" 
like the referenced Wuffs library. As the article you linked says:


 > Wuffs has 20 JSON quirks so far. As always, there are trade-offs. 
They’re not free (in terms of maintenance cost) and have super-linear 
complexity: that file’s comments also has 12 call-outs to the subtleties 
of combining two particular quirks.


I would really love for one of these conservative supersets of JSON to 
become a widely-adopted, formal standard, and would then welcome native 
PHP support. But unless and until that happens, I think this is too much 
of a minefield.


Regards,

-- 
Rowan Tommins
[IMSoP]