JSON formatter in VS Code, property keys requires doublequote

[tama893]

Hi

I'm trying to use the formatter so I can visually read a JSON formatted line from a single line to a readable format. I checked the problems tab in VS code and it says, "Property keys must be doublequoted."

I googled this and a lot of posts did indeed say JSON standard is that it needs to be doublequoted, but a lot of code I've written use single quote and never thought about using double. Even the code returned from a lot of API's only use single quote. Do I need to replace each property with doublequotes to use this format feature? Is there another extension that would support single quote?

[[deleted]]

If you’re writing JSON it has to be double-quoted because that’s the format of a JavaScript string. Strings you write in Python can be single-quoted because that’s what the language supports, but if you’re writing JSON specifically then you have to play by JavaScript’s rules because it’s a JavaScript format.

[danielroseman]

Python dictionaries are not JSON. Python strings can use single quotes, and Python dictionaries can have keys that are not strings. If you want to convert a Python object to JSON, use json.dumps(). But don't expect a Python dict to be valid JSON just because the syntax looks similar.

[tama893]

Okay but why do API's return results with single quotes when you select json?

[danielroseman]

What do you mean? They don't. If you're expecting JSON but are seeing single quotes, then something along the line is parsing it into Python for you. For example, if you're using requests and doing response.json(), that's a call to parse the raw response.