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Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

I just checked YAML 1.2 and it seems that 1024 limit length on keys still in spec (https://yaml.org/spec/1.2.2/, ctrl+f, 1024). So any JSON with long keys is not compatible with YAML.

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The JSON specification [1] states:

> An implementation may set limits on the length and character contents of strings.

So this length limit is not a source of incompatibility with JSON.

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7159#section-9

Wow! That makes it pretty hard to know you've generated useful JSON especially if your goal is to for cross-ecosystem communication.

To be fair, any JSON implentation is going to have a practical limit on the key size, it's just a bit more random and harder to figure out :)

If you mean limited by available memory, then sure but that does not apply just to key size. If you mean something else, could you elaborate?

I guess it is about different implementations of some not properly formalized parts of the JSON spec.

There was also an article here some time ago but I cannot find it right now.

I assume JSON implementations have a some limit on the key size (or on the whole document which limits the key size), hopefully far below the available memory.

I assume and hope that they do not, if there is no rule stating that they are invalid. There are valid reasons for JSON to massive keys. A simple one: depending on the programming language and libraries used, an unordered array ["a","b","c"] might be better mapped as a dictionary {"a":1,"b":1,"c":1}. Now all of your keys are semantically values, and any limit imposed on keys only makes sense if the same limit is also imposed on values.

Yes absolutely, in practice the limit seems to be on the document size rather than on keys specifically. That said it still sets a limit on the key size (to something a bit less that the max full size), and some JSON documents valid for a given JSON implentation might not be parsable by others, in which case the Yaml parsers are no exceptions ;)

I'm not even sure why I'm playing the devil's advocate, I hate Yaml actually :D

Another reason to have a limit well below the computer's memory capacity is that one could find ill-formed documents in the wild, e.g., an unclosed quotation mark, causing the "rest' of a potentially large file to be read as a key, which can quickly snowball (imagine if you need to store the keys in a database, in a log, if your algorithms need to copy the keys, etc.)

1024 limit is for unquoted keys, which do not occur in JSON

Have a closer look. The 1024 limit in version 1.2 is only for implicit block mapping keys, not for flow style `{"foo": "bar"}`

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