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I might suggest using YAML too, either as an alternative or as a complete replacement. YAML (when written in a certain way) is basically JSON without any line noise, and optimized for human reading and writing. You will be able to parse it exactly the same.

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I tried that too, but sometimes the nesting level is too deep for YAML. There were also some difficulties when escaping special characters in YAML.

In regards to the nesting level: what do you mean? There shouldn't be any technical limit on the nesting depth.

As for escaping special characters: I've run into that a lot, and I agree it is very annoying. God help you if you want to specify regexes on lines.

So for a lot of my YAML-ish applications, where YAML is used for user templating or configuration, I run everything through a really simple postprocessor (often by encapsulating non-digit lines with single quotes, and a few other tweaks) and that seems to work well for me. That way the user only has to type the bare minimum (no double quotes, no curly braces, no/fewer commas), and what they write "just works."

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