use Perl

• well (Score:1)

  by rjbs (4671)

  Can you fudge it?

  { "bytestring": [ 3,2,12,3,12,31,210,2,18] }

  --
  rjbs
  • Re: (Score:2)

    by jesse (2531)

    I can manually marshal into base64 which will be a lot more compact than something like the array bytestring hack. but then everyone consuming my format needs to come up with the same extension and needs to sniff values for encoding. and that makes me cry.
• Sorry to tell you this ... (Score:2)

  by Ovid (2709)

  Nope, it doesn't. I believe that's because JSON is valid JavaScript syntax and there's no "natural" way to represent binary in a simple string format.
• What do you really mean by 'binary data'? (Score:1)

  by Tim Bunce (2254)

  A JavaScript string is defined as a "sequence of zero or more 16-bit unsigned integer values." (http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/files/ECMA-ST/Ecma-262.pdf)
  
  and http://json.org/ [json.org] says "A string is a collection of zero or more Unicode characters, wrapped in double quotes, using backslash escapes. [...]. A string is very much like a C or Java string."
  
  Does that mean JSON "doesn't have native support for binary data"? Depends on your needs I guess (and whether you control the sending and/or receivin
  • Re: (Score:1)

    by Tim Bunce (2254)

    "that happen to be 256" should be "that happen to be < 256"
• png & (Score:1)

  by Proclus (8605)

  Not related to JSON directly, but I've been reading the ajaxian the other day, and one guy managed to put the Prototype.js into a compressed PNG and read it back with the canvas methods. The whole 124K lib shrank to 30K: http://ajaxian.com/archives/compression-using-canvas-and-png [ajaxian.com]
• JSON::XS makes it easy (Score:2)

  by ask (83)

  No, you have to encode it as ascii (or as latin1 if the other end of the transaction can be told about that).
  
  $ perl -MJSON::XS -MFile::Slurp -e '$g=read_file("add.gif"); print JSON::XS->new->ascii(1)->encode({file=>$g})' > json
  
  $ perl -MJSON::XS -MFile::Slurp -e '$g=read_file("json"); $d = decode_json($g); print $d->{file}' > gif
  
  $ diff add.gif gif
  $

  --
  

  -- ask bjoern hansen [askbjoernhansen.com], !try; do();
  • Re: (Score:2)

    by jesse (2531)

    Encoding one property as ascii is portable? I didn't think JSON had a way to mark encoding for individual nodes.
    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ask (83)

      I didn't read the ECMAScript spec, but according to JSON.org then \u[four hex digits] is a valid way to specify a "character", so yes - I think so. It's still unicode, but you "munge" it to not have any high bits.
      
      

      --
      

      -- ask bjoern hansen [askbjoernhansen.com], !try; do();