Ask YC: JSON Editor | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: JSON Editor

9 pointsra6 comments

Hello, Anyone know of a decent JSON editor for OS X / Linux, that doesn't require Eclipse?

Preferably FOSS.

many thanks

"... Anyone know of a decent JSON editor for OS X / Linux ..."

Vim, emacs or some other text editor.

One of the key ideas behind JSON is to make it editable by humans and readable by machines. So a text editor and check the output with http://www.jsonlint.com/ or use your favourite language to parse it ~ http://www.json.org

Alternatively, you could use your "native" language and encode the data. I do that a lot, like so (Python):

  >>> import simplejson
  >>> v = ["My Values", {"type": 123, "Megahertz": 123.456}]
  >>> print simplejson.dumps(v)
  ["My Values", {"Megahertz": 123.456, "type": 123}]

Heck, you could even do this:

  >>> while True: print simplejson.dumps(input("JSON> "))
  ... 
  JSON> ["Hello", "World", [123, 321]]
  ["Hello", "World", [123, 321]]
  JSON> [True, False, None]
  [true, false, null]

In the real world, I would think all JSON would be produced by code (there are easier to read/write formats for human generated data, like YAML or key=value or INI style config files, for which there are numerous parsers in every language I can think of).

Perl has JSON::XS (my favorite) and the compatible pure-Perl JSON::PP, as well a few other options of varying degrees of quality and performance.

  use JSON::XS;
  my $json_reply = JSON::XS->new;
  print $json_reply->encode(["Hello", "World", [123, 321]]);

We use map and grep extensively to produce the JSON to build our GUI elements, and it works like magic. I'm sure Ruby and PHP have similar libraries.

If you really want an "editor", you could check out the graphical JSON editor included with the ruby json package: http://json.rubyforge.org/screenshots.html

Great! Thanks very much - just what I was looking for.

I only want an editor to fiddle with (tidy up) some data, which is in JSON format becasue it was exported from the django dumpdata command.

As it's a one off task - I didn't really want to get into writing a script.

Cheers

I like YAML for actual editing, JSON is more of a "machine language" than something that's human-readable.

To convert YAML to JSON, something like:

  perl -MYAML=Load -MJSON::Any -E 'say JSON::Any->new->Dump(Load(do { local $/; <> }))'

should do the trick.

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