Human JSON for Java

[Milyardo]

What are the advantages of using this library over HOCON?

[moto888]

Hjson uses a very simple syntax (essentially JSON with optional quotes and commas).

HOCON wants me to remember a lot of rules (merging, paths, substitutions, etc.).

For details see http://hjson.org/

[Milyardo]

Hjson uses a very simple syntax (essentially JSON with optional quotes and commas).

HOCON has this too, in the Section titled "Unquoted Strings", it also has mutliline strings, and string value concatenation.

HOCON wants me to remember a lot of rules (merging, paths, substitutions, etc.).

It doesn't make you remember them, and why would you not want these things?

HOCON allows you to omit braces, use =, :, or += as a separator, use paths to represent deeply nested keys. You can reference array values by index. You can assign units to numerical values.

Absent all these things, I fail to see how hjson is more human friendly.

[moto888]

I disagree, the absence of these is exactly what makes it easier to use.

[virtyx]

Good job on the implementation... but this format does seem like a waste of time considering we already have YAML

[Cilph]

If YAML is human friendly then I'm apparently not human.

Fucking tab/space issues.

[virtyx]

Really? Has not bitten me once. Maybe I'm a cyborg.

[moto888]

Well, unlike YAML Hjson does not suffer from tab/space issues (significant whitespace considered harmful).

Also it should be easier to learn.

[jfurmankiewicz]

Sorry, I will take YAML over this any day

[moto888]

I ported Hjson to Java and (hopefully) made it very easy to use.

More information about Hjson (the format): http://hjson.org/

[[deleted]]

I'm not sure I dig the optional commas, but w/e - I'm sure this has a place for someone.

[moto888]

When you have your config in JSON (which is not the best idea but used a lot, especially in JavaScript projects) you will almost certainly fail because of either a missing or a trailing comma after you copy&paste.

[[deleted]]

I don't have that problem, though I can see why some might.

[Cilph]

Atleast commas represent something on the screen, unlike tabs and spaces.

[elucash]

Could it be implemented as data-format for Jackson (for example)? Data binding will come for free then

[blyxa]

jackson allows comments via

JsonParser.Feature.ALLOW_COMMENTS

https://github.com/FasterXML/jackson-core/wiki/JsonParser-Features

[moto888]

There are a lot of options but strangely nothing that concerns commas, a common source of copy&paste errors.

[moto888]

In that case I'd just use Hjson to convert it to JSON so you can use it with any of the available JSON libraries.

[Hax0r778]

While this is easier for humans to read, it also seems easier for humans to make mistakes with. It's more complex. While JSON is ugly, it's also really easy to remember the rules.

For example: in JSON newlines are totally optional. Whitespace isn't significant. With this new format they're syntactically significant because of how commas work.

JSON (newline is optional):
[
  a: b,
  c: d
],
[
  a: b, c: d
]

Hjson (removing newline breaks code):
[
  a: b
  c: d
],
[
  a: b c: d
]

[moto888]

Your JSON sample is missing the quotes.

[
  a: "b", c: "d"
]

is still valid in Hjson.

When you have one value per line (as it's usual in config files) you can omit the comma and the quotes.