Postel's law plead: gracefully handle octal character escapes in input "json" about jq HOT 8 CLOSED

Yeah, I don't want jq to ever accept non-JSON by default, but a command-line argument to accept sorta-kinda-nearly-json would occasionally be handy.

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I made a stand-alone shell clean-up tool for anyone else with the same problem that can't wait for something like this, but it would be nice not to need it: https://gist.github.com/4323895

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FYI:

% node
> a = "\000"
'\u0000'
> JSON.stringify(a)
'"\\u0000"'
> JSON.parse(JSON.stringify(a))
'\u0000'
> JSON.parse('"\\u0000"')
'\u0000'
> JSON.parse('"\\000"')
... ^C
> JSON.parse('"\\007"')
... ^C
>

I also tried the Chrome console:

> JSON.parse('"\\u0000"')
""
> JSON.parse('"\\000"')
SyntaxError: Unexpected number

I think you might be confused. Near as I can tell ECMAscript accepts octal escapes (it does), but ECMAScript's JSON.parse() doesn't. Indeed, ECMAScript 6 (draft) doesn't allow octal escapes: http://people.mozilla.org/~jorendorff/es6-draft.html#sec-15.12.1 .

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I don't think this is about octal escapes ever being valid JSON, or even accepted by any sane JSON parser.

Sadly, there is a certain amount of non-JSON around that people refer to as "json", which often happens to be valid ECMAScript that eval()s to something representable in JSON. jq doesn't (and won't) accept such nonsense by default, but it might be useful to have a --broken-json argument that uses a different JSON parser which accepts some arbitrary collection of sorta-common almost-json syntaxes.

Not something I have time for at the moment, but might be worth implementing eventually.

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I don't think this is about octal escapes ever being valid JSON, or even accepted by any sane JSON parser.

Ah.

Sadly, there is a certain amount of non-JSON around that people refer to as "json", which often happens to be valid ECMAScript that eval()s to something representable in JSON. jq doesn't (and won't) accept such nonsense by default, but it might be useful to have a --broken-json argument that uses a different JSON parser which accepts some arbitrary collection of sorta-common almost-json syntaxes.

Yes, options for parsing "extensions" would be nice.

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Command-line-flag-invoked lenient parsing sounds good; the json spec is strict about what is legal for a reason.

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about the silent output ?.. I just want to see the following:

% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
100 762 100 762 0 0 12 0 0:01:03 0:01:00 0:00:03 180

and nothing more !

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IMO jq should have multiple parsers, or perhaps it should be pluggable as to parsers. That way jq could be made to parse dirty-JSON, JSONish, and even binary JSON formats. As for the default behavior, invalid values should not be parsed, and valid values should not be parsed differently -- specifically there should be no octal escape support in the jq JSON parser, as JSON does not include octal escapes.

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