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Is it possible to have multi-line strings in JSON?
It's mostly for visual comfort so I suppose I can just turn word wrap on in my editor, but I'm just kinda curious.
I'm writing some data files in JSON format and would like to have some really long string values split over multiple lines. Using python's JSON module I get a whole lot of errors, whether I use \ or \n as an escape.
JSON does not allow real line-breaks. You need to replace all the line breaks with \n.
eg:
"first line
second line"
can be saved with:
"first line\nsecond line"
Note:
for Python, this should be written as:
"first line\\nsecond line"
where \\ is for escaping the backslash, otherwise python will treat \n as
the control character "new line"
Unfortunately many of the answers here address the question of how to put a newline character in the string data. The question is how to make the code look nicer by splitting the string value across multiple lines of code. (And even the answers that recognize this provide "solutions" that assume one is free to change the data representation, which in many cases one is not.)
And the worse news is, there is no good answer.
In many programming languages, even if they don't explicitly support splitting strings across lines, you can still use string concatenation to get the desired effect; and as long as the compiler isn't awful this is fine.
But json is not a programming language; it's just a data representation. You can't tell it to concatenate strings. Nor does its (fairly small) grammar include any facility for representing a string on multiple lines.
Short of devising a pre-processor of some kind (and I, for one, don't feel like effectively making up my own language to solve this issue), there isn't a general solution to this problem. IF you can change the data format, then you can substitute an array of strings. Otherwise, this is one of the numerous ways that json isn't designed for human-readability.
I have had to do this for a small Node.js project and found this work-around to store multiline strings as array of lines to make it more human-readable (at a cost of extra code to convert them to string later):
{
"modify_head": [
"<script type='text/javascript'>",
"<!--",
" function drawSomeText(id) {",
" var pjs = Processing.getInstanceById(id);",
" var text = document.getElementById('inputtext').value;",
" pjs.drawText(text);}",
"-->",
"</script>"
],
"modify_body": [
"<input type='text' id='inputtext'></input>",
"<button onclick=drawSomeText('ExampleCanvas')></button>"
],
}
Once parsed, I just use myData.modify_head.join('\n') or myData.modify_head.join(), depending upon whether I want a line break after each string or not.
This looks quite neat to me, apart from that I have to use double quotes everywhere. Though otherwise, I could, perhaps, use YAML, but that has other pitfalls and is not supported natively.
Check out the specification! The JSON grammar's char production can take the following values:
any-Unicode-character-except-"-or-\-or-control-character
\"
\\
\/
\b
\f
\n
\r
\t
\u four-hex-digits
Newlines are "control characters" so, no, you may not have a literal newline within your string. However you may encode it using whatever combination of \n and \r you require.
JSON doesn't allow breaking lines for readability.
Your best bet is to use an IDE that will line-wrap for you.
This is a really old question, but I came across this on a search and I think I know the source of your problem.
JSON does not allow "real" newlines in its data; it can only have escaped newlines. See the answer from #YOU. According to the question, it looks like you attempted to escape line breaks in Python two ways: by using the line continuation character ("\") or by using "\n" as an escape.
But keep in mind: if you are using a string in python, special escaped characters ("\t", "\n") are translated into REAL control characters! The "\n" will be replaced with the ASCII control character representing a newline character, which is precisely the character that is illegal in JSON. (As for the line continuation character, it simply takes the newline out.)
So what you need to do is to prevent Python from escaping characters. You can do this by using a raw string (put r in front of the string, as in r"abc\ndef", or by including an extra slash in front of the newline ("abc\\ndef").
Both of the above will, instead of replacing "\n" with the real newline ASCII control character, will leave "\n" as two literal characters, which then JSON can interpret as a newline escape.
Write property value as a array of strings. Like example given over here https://gun.io/blog/multi-line-strings-in-json/. This will help.
We can always use array of strings for multiline strings like following.
{
"singleLine": "Some singleline String",
"multiline": ["Line one", "line Two", "Line Three"]
}
And we can easily iterate array to display content in multi line fashion.
While not standard, I found that some of the JSON libraries have options to support multiline Strings. I am saying this with the caveat, that this will hurt your interoperability.
However in the specific scenario I ran into, I needed to make a config file that was only ever used by one system readable and manageable by humans. And opted for this solution in the end.
Here is how this works out on Java with Jackson:
JsonMapper mapper = JsonMapper.builder()
.enable(JsonReadFeature.ALLOW_UNESCAPED_CONTROL_CHARS)
.build()
This is a very old question, but I had the same question when I wanted to improve readability of our Vega JSON Specification code which uses complex conditoinal expressions. The code is like this.
As this answer says, JSON is not designed for human. I understand that is a historical decision and it makes sense for data exchange purposes. However, JSON is still used as source code for such cases. So I asked our engineers to use Hjson for source code and process it to JSON.
For example, in Git for Windows environment,
you can download the Hjson cli binary and put it in git/bin directory to use.
Then, convert (transpile) Hjson source to JSON. To use automation tools such as Make will be useful to generate JSON.
$ which hjson
/c/Program Files/git/bin/hjson
$ cat example.hjson
{
md:
'''
First line.
Second line.
This line is indented by two spaces.
'''
}
$ hjson -j example.hjson > example.json
$ cat example.json
{
"md": "First line.\nSecond line.\n This line is indented by two spaces."
}
In case of using the transformed JSON in programming languages, language-specific libraries like hjson-js will be useful.
I noticed the same idea was posted in a duplicated question but I would share a bit more information.
You can encode at client side and decode at server side. This will take care of \n and \t characters as well
e.g. I needed to send multiline xml through json
{
"xml": "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"
}
then decode it on server side
public class XMLInput
{
public string xml { get; set; }
public string DecodeBase64()
{
var valueBytes = System.Convert.FromBase64String(this.xml);
return Encoding.UTF8.GetString(valueBytes);
}
}
public async Task<string> PublishXMLAsync([FromBody] XMLInput xmlInput)
{
string data = xmlInput.DecodeBase64();
}
once decoded you'll get your original xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<Structures>
<inputs>
# This program adds two numbers
num1 = 1.5
num2 = 6.3
# Add two numbers
sum = num1 + num2
# Display the sum
print('The sum of {0} and {1} is {2}'.format(num1, num2, sum))
</inputs>
</Structures>
\n\r\n worked for me !!
\n for single line break and \n\r\n for double line break
I see many answers here that may not works in most cases but may be the easiest solution if let's say you wanna output what you wrote down inside a JSON file (for example: for language translations where you wanna have just one key with more than 1 line outputted on the client) can be just adding some special characters of your choice PS: allowed by the JSON files like \\ before the new line and use some JS to parse the text ... like:
Example:
File (text.json)
{"text": "some JSON text. \\ Next line of JSON text"}
import text from 'text.json'
{text.split('\\')
.map(line => {
return (
<div>
{line}
<br />
</div>
);
})}}
Assuming the question has to do with easily editing text files and then manually converting them to json, there are two solutions I found:
hjson (that was mentioned in this previous answer), in which case you can convert your existing json file to hjson format by executing hjson source.json > target.hjson, edit in your favorite editor, and convert back to json hjson -j target.hjson > source.json. You can download the binary here or use the online conversion here.
jsonnet, which does the same, but with a slightly different format (single and double quoted strings are simply allowed to span multiple lines). Conveniently, the homepage has editable input fields so you can simply insert your multiple line json/jsonnet files there and they will be converted online to standard json immediately. Note that jsonnet supports much more goodies for templating json files, so it may be useful to look into, depending on your needs.
If it's just for presentation in your editor you may use ` instead of " or '
const obj = {
myMultiLineString: `This is written in a \
multiline way. \
The backside of it is that you \
can't use indentation on every new \
line because is would be included in \
your string. \
The backslash after each line escapes the carriage return.
`
}
Examples:
console.log(`First line \
Second line`);
will put in console:
First line Second line
console.log(`First line
second line`);
will put in console:
First line
second line
Hope this answered your question.
In reference to this question,
How to download and get values from JSON file using VBScript or batch file?
how to get the values from JSON file that looks like this,
["AA-BB-CC-MAKE-SAME.json","SS-ED-SIXSIX-TENSE.json","FF-EE-EE-EE-WW.json","ZS-WE-AS-FOUR-MINE.json","DD-RF-LATERS-LATER.json","FG-ER-DC-ED-FG.json"]
using AppleScript in MAC OS?
Here is part of VBScript code in Windows provided by Hackoo,
strJson = http.responseText
Result = Extract(strJson,"(\x22(.*)\x22)")
Arr = Split(Result,",")
For each Item in Arr
wscript.echo Item
Next
'******************************************
Function Extract(Data,Pattern)
Dim oRE,oMatches,Match,Line
set oRE = New RegExp
oRE.IgnoreCase = True
oRE.Global = True
oRE.Pattern = Pattern
set oMatches = oRE.Execute(Data)
If not isEmpty(oMatches) then
For Each Match in oMatches
Line = Line & Trim(Match.Value) & vbCrlf
Next
Extract = Line
End if
End Function
'******************************************
In MAC OS AppleScript I only need the code to get the values of the JSON file to a single array of string values. The above shown example above the VBScript is the how JSON file contents looks like.
Short answer: Unfortunately, AppleScript doesn't provide a built-in feature to parse JSON which is analogous to JavaScript's JSON.parse() method.
Below are a couple of solutions:
Solution 1: Requires a third party plug-in to be installed, which may not always be feasible.
Solution 2: Does not require any third party plug-in to be installed, and instead utilizes tools/features built-in to macOS as standard.
Solution 1:
If you have the luxury of being able to install a third-party plugin on your users systems then you can install JSON Helper for AppleScript (As suggested by #user3439894 in the comments).
Then use it in your AppleScript as follows:
set srcJson to read POSIX file (POSIX path of (path to home folder) & "Desktop/foobar.json")
tell application "JSON Helper" to set myList to read JSON from srcJson
Explanation:
On line 1 we read the contents of the .json file and assign it to the variable named srcJson.
Note You'll need to change the path part (i.e. Desktop/foobar.json) as necessary.
On line 2 we parse the contents using the JSON Helper plug-in. This assigns each item of the source JSON Array to a new AppleScript list. The resultant AppleScript list is assigned to a variable named myList.
Solution 2:
By utilizing tools built-in to macOS as standard, you can also do the following via AppleScript. This assumes that your JSON file is valid and contains a single Array only:
set TID to AppleScript's text item delimiters
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ","
set myList to text items of (do shell script "tr ''\\\\n\\\\r'' ' ' <~/Desktop/foobar.json | sed 's/^ *\\[ *\"//; s/ *\" *\\] *$//; s/\" *, *\"/,/g;'")
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to TID
Note: you'll need to change the path part (i.e. ~/Desktop/foobar.json) as necessary.
Also, if your .json filename includes a space(s) you'll need to escape them with \\. For instance ~/Desktop/foo\\ bar.json
Explanation:
On line 1 AppleScript's current text item delimiters are assigned to a variable named TID.
On line 2 AppleScript's text item delimiters are set to a comma - this will help when extracting each individual value from the source JSON Array and assigning each value to a new AppleScript list.
On line 3 a shell script is executed via the do shell script command, which performs the following:
Reads the content of the source .json file via the part which reads ~/Desktop/foobar.json. This path currently assumes the file is named foobar.json and resides in your Desktop folder (You'll need to change this path to wherever your actual file exists).
The content of foobar.json is redirected, (note the < before the filepath), to tr (i.e. the part which reads: tr ''\\\\n\\\\r'' ' '). This translation will replace any newline characters which may exists in the contents of the source .json Array with space characters. This ensures the contents of foobar.json is transformed to one line.
Note: A JSON Array can contain newlines between each item and still be valid, so although the example JSON given in your question appears on one line - it is not a requirement of this solution as it will handle multi-line too.
The one line of text is then piped to sed's s command for further processing (i.e. the part which reads: | sed 's/^ *\\[ *\"//; s/ *\" *\\] *$//; s/\" *, *\"/,/g;').
The syntax of the s command is 's/regexp/replacement/flags'.
Let's breakdown each s command to further understand what is happening:
s/^ *\\[ *\"// removes the opening square bracket [, which may be preceded or followed by zero or more space characters, and the following double quote (i.e. the first occurrence) from the beginning of the string.
s/ *\" *\\] *$// removes the closing square bracket ], which may be preceded or followed by zero or more space characters, and the preceding double quote (i.e. the last occurrence) from the end of the string.
s/\" *, *\"/,/g replaces single commas, (which may be preceded with zero or more spaces, and/or followed by zero or more spaces) with a single comma.
The initial part on line 3 which reads; set myList to text items of ... utilizes text items to read the String into an AppleScript list using commas as delimiters to determine each item of the list. The resultant Array is assigned to a variable named myList.
On line 4 AppleScript's text item delimiters are restored to their original value.
Utilizing a variable for the source JSON filepath.
If you want to utilize a variable for the filepath to the source .json file then you can do something like this instead:
set srcFilePath to quoted form of (POSIX path of (path to home folder) & "Desktop/foobar.json")
set TID to AppleScript's text item delimiters
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ","
set myList to text items of (do shell script "tr ''\\\\n\\\\r'' ' ' <" & srcFilePath & " | sed 's/^ *\\[ *\"//; s/ *\" *\\] *$//; s/\" *, *\"/,/g;'")
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to TID
Note This is very much the same as the first example. The notable differences are:
On the first line we assign the filepath to a variable named srcFilePath.
In the do shell script we reference the srcFilePath variable.
Additional note regarding JSON escaped special characters: Solution 2 preserves any JSON escaped special characters which may be present in the values of source JSON array. However, Solution 1 will interpret them.
Caveats Solution 2 produces unexpected results when an item in the source JSON array includes a comma because a comma is used as a text item delimiters.
How to get the values from JSON file that looks like this,
["AA-BB-CC-MAKE-SAME.json","SS-ED-SIXSIX-TENSE.json","FF-EE-EE-EE-WW.json","ZS-WE-AS-FOUR-MINE.json","DD-RF-LATERS-LATER.json","FG-ER-DC-ED-FG.json"]
If you actually mean what you wrote, and that the contents of the JSON file is that list of six strings in a single array, formatted on a single line, the simplest way is to treat it as text, trim the opening and closing square brackets, then delimit its fields at every occurrence of a ,. Finally, each individual text item can have the surrounding quotes trimmed as well.
Examining the VBScript, it looks like it uses a very similar process, albeit with regular expressions, which AppleScript doesn't feature but which aren't especially necessary in this simple situation.
Let's assume that the JSON array above is stored in a file on your desktop called "myfile.json". Then:
set home to the path to home folder
set f to the POSIX path of home & "Desktop/myfile.json"
set JSONstr to read POSIX file f
# Trim square brackets
set JSONstr to text 2 thru -2 of JSONstr
# Delimit text fields using comma
set the text item delimiters to ","
set Arr to the text items of JSONstr
# Trim quotes of each item in Arr
repeat with a in Arr
set contents of a to text 2 thru -2 of a
end repeat
# The final array
Arr
I only need the code to get the values of the JSON file to a single array of string values. The above shown example above the VBScript is the how JSON file contents looks like.
The variable Arr now contains the array (referred to as lists in AppleScript) of string values. You can access a particular item in it like this:
item 2 of Arr --> "SS-ED-SIXSIX-TENSE.json"
A More General Solution
I've decided to include a more advanced way to handle JSON in an AppleScript, partly because I've been doing a lot of JSON processing quite recently and this is all fresh on my event horizon; but also to demonstrate that, using AppleScriptObjC, parsing even very complex JSON data is not only possible, but quite simple.
I don't think you'll need it in this specific case, but it could come in useful for some future situation.
The script has three sections: it starts off importing the relevant Objective-C framework that gives AppleScript additional powers; then, I define the actual handler itself, called JSONtoRecord, which I describe below. Lastly, comes the bottom of the script where you can enter your code and do whatever you like with it:
use framework "Foundation"
use scripting additions
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
property ca : a reference to current application
property NSData : a reference to ca's NSData
property NSDictionary : a reference to ca's NSDictionary
property NSJSONSerialization : a reference to ca's NSJSONSerialization
property NSString : a reference to ca's NSString
property NSUTF8StringEncoding : a reference to 4
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
on JSONtoRecord from fp
local fp
set JSONdata to NSData's dataWithContentsOfFile:fp
set [x, E] to (NSJSONSerialization's ¬
JSONObjectWithData:JSONdata ¬
options:0 ¬
|error|:(reference))
if E ≠ missing value then error E
tell x to if its isKindOfClass:NSDictionary then ¬
return it as record
x as list
end JSONtoRecord
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
###YOUR CODE BELOW HERE
#
#
set home to the path to home folder
set f to the POSIX path of home & "Desktop/myfile.json"
JSONtoRecord from f
--> {"AA-BB-CC-MAKE-SAME.json", "SS-ED-SIXSIX-TENSE.json", ¬
--> "FF-EE-EE-EE-WW.json", "ZS-WE-AS-FOUR-MINE.json", ¬
--> "DD-RF-LATERS-LATER.json", "FG-ER-DC-ED-FG.json"}
At the bottom of the script, I've called the JSONtoRecord handler, passing it the location of myfile.json. One of the benefits of this handler is that it doesn't matter whether the file is formatted all on one line, or over many lines. It can also handle complex, nested JSON arrays.
In those instances, what it returns is a native AppleScript record object, with all the JSON variables stored as property values in the record. Accessing the variables then becomes very simple.
This is actually exactly what the JSON Helper application that a couple of people have already mentioned does under the hood.
The one criterion (other than the JSON file containing valid JSON data) is that the path to the file is a posix path written in full, e.g. /Users/CK/Desktop/myfile.json, and not ~/Desktop/myfile.json or, even worse, Macintosh HD:Users:CK:Desktop:myfile.json.
I have an HTML internal doc that I want to strip character vectors from. Specifically, I am trying to parse Google results.
##create search query
vcSearchInput <- "Alberta+Alabama+USA+latitude+longitude"
##scrape and parse google results to XML
vcSearchOutput <- getURL(paste0("http://www.google.com/search?q=",vcSearchInput))
from here, I can that exactly what I want comes after:
<a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?um=1&ie=UTF-8&fb=1&gl=us&sa=X&ll=
I have figured out converting to character:
vaSearchOutput <- paste(capture.output(vaSearchOutput,file="test.txt"),collapse="")
But, of course, my search string has TONS of special characters that require escaping.
I tried:
gregexpr("http\\:\\/\\/maps\\.google\\.com\\/maps\\?um\\=1\\&\\;ie\\=UTF\\-8\\&\\;fb\\=1\\&\\;gl\\=us\\&\\;sa\\=X\\&\\;ll\\=",vaSearchOutput,ignore.case=T)
I tried:
regmatches(regexpr("maps\\.google\\.com.*",vaSearchOutput,ignore.case=T),vaSearchOutput)
and received:
Error in so + attr(m, "match.length")[ind] :
non-numeric argument to binary operator
So how can I work with these kinds of variable types to find regular expressions?
I am trying to use a formatted string to identify the file location when using 'print -dpdf file_name' to write a plot (or figure) to a file.
I've tried:
k=1;
file_name = sprintf("\'/home/user/directory to use/file%3.3i.pdf\'",k);
print -dpdf file_name;
but that only gets me a figure written to ~/file_name.pdf which is not what I want. I've tried several other approaches but I cannot find an approach that causes the the third term (file_name, in this example) to be evaluated. I have not found any other printing function that will allow me to perform a formatted write (the '-dpdf' option) of a plot (or figure) to a file.
I need the single quotes because the path name to the location where I want to write the file contains spaces. (I'm working on a Linux box running Fedora 24 updated daily.)
If I compute the file name using the line above, then cut and paste it into the print statement, everything works exactly as I wish it to. I've tried using
k=1;
file_name = sprintf("\'/home/user/directory to use/file%3.3i.pdf\'",k);
print ("-dpdf", '/home/user/directory to use/file001.pdf');
But simply switching to a different form of print statement doesn't solve the problem,although now I get an error message:
GPL Ghostscript 9.16: **** Could not open the file '/home/user/directory to use/file001.pdf' .
**** Unable to open the initial device, quitting.
warning: broken pipe
if you use foo a b this is the same as foo ("a", "b"). In your case you called print ("-dpdf", "file_name")
k = 1;
file_name = sprintf ("/home/user/directory to use/file%3.3i.pdf", k);
print ("-dpdf", file_name);
Observe:
>> k=1;
>> file_name = sprintf ('/home/tasos/Desktop/a folder with spaces in it/this is file number %3.3i.pdf', k)
file_name = /home/tasos/Desktop/a folder with spaces in it/this is file number 001.pdf
>> plot (1 : 10);
>> print (gcf, file_name, '-dpdf')
Tadaaa!
So yeah, no single quotes needed. The reason single quotes work when you're "typing it by hand" is because you're literally creating the string on the spot with the single quotes.
Having said that, it's generally a good idea when generating absolute paths to use the fullfile command instead. Have a look at it.
Tasos Papastylianou #TasosPapastylianou provided great help. My problem is now solved.
Is it possible to have multi-line strings in JSON?
It's mostly for visual comfort so I suppose I can just turn word wrap on in my editor, but I'm just kinda curious.
I'm writing some data files in JSON format and would like to have some really long string values split over multiple lines. Using python's JSON module I get a whole lot of errors, whether I use \ or \n as an escape.
JSON does not allow real line-breaks. You need to replace all the line breaks with \n.
eg:
"first line
second line"
can be saved with:
"first line\nsecond line"
Note:
for Python, this should be written as:
"first line\\nsecond line"
where \\ is for escaping the backslash, otherwise python will treat \n as
the control character "new line"
Unfortunately many of the answers here address the question of how to put a newline character in the string data. The question is how to make the code look nicer by splitting the string value across multiple lines of code. (And even the answers that recognize this provide "solutions" that assume one is free to change the data representation, which in many cases one is not.)
And the worse news is, there is no good answer.
In many programming languages, even if they don't explicitly support splitting strings across lines, you can still use string concatenation to get the desired effect; and as long as the compiler isn't awful this is fine.
But json is not a programming language; it's just a data representation. You can't tell it to concatenate strings. Nor does its (fairly small) grammar include any facility for representing a string on multiple lines.
Short of devising a pre-processor of some kind (and I, for one, don't feel like effectively making up my own language to solve this issue), there isn't a general solution to this problem. IF you can change the data format, then you can substitute an array of strings. Otherwise, this is one of the numerous ways that json isn't designed for human-readability.
I have had to do this for a small Node.js project and found this work-around to store multiline strings as array of lines to make it more human-readable (at a cost of extra code to convert them to string later):
{
"modify_head": [
"<script type='text/javascript'>",
"<!--",
" function drawSomeText(id) {",
" var pjs = Processing.getInstanceById(id);",
" var text = document.getElementById('inputtext').value;",
" pjs.drawText(text);}",
"-->",
"</script>"
],
"modify_body": [
"<input type='text' id='inputtext'></input>",
"<button onclick=drawSomeText('ExampleCanvas')></button>"
],
}
Once parsed, I just use myData.modify_head.join('\n') or myData.modify_head.join(), depending upon whether I want a line break after each string or not.
This looks quite neat to me, apart from that I have to use double quotes everywhere. Though otherwise, I could, perhaps, use YAML, but that has other pitfalls and is not supported natively.
Check out the specification! The JSON grammar's char production can take the following values:
any-Unicode-character-except-"-or-\-or-control-character
\"
\\
\/
\b
\f
\n
\r
\t
\u four-hex-digits
Newlines are "control characters" so, no, you may not have a literal newline within your string. However you may encode it using whatever combination of \n and \r you require.
JSON doesn't allow breaking lines for readability.
Your best bet is to use an IDE that will line-wrap for you.
This is a really old question, but I came across this on a search and I think I know the source of your problem.
JSON does not allow "real" newlines in its data; it can only have escaped newlines. See the answer from #YOU. According to the question, it looks like you attempted to escape line breaks in Python two ways: by using the line continuation character ("\") or by using "\n" as an escape.
But keep in mind: if you are using a string in python, special escaped characters ("\t", "\n") are translated into REAL control characters! The "\n" will be replaced with the ASCII control character representing a newline character, which is precisely the character that is illegal in JSON. (As for the line continuation character, it simply takes the newline out.)
So what you need to do is to prevent Python from escaping characters. You can do this by using a raw string (put r in front of the string, as in r"abc\ndef", or by including an extra slash in front of the newline ("abc\\ndef").
Both of the above will, instead of replacing "\n" with the real newline ASCII control character, will leave "\n" as two literal characters, which then JSON can interpret as a newline escape.
Write property value as a array of strings. Like example given over here https://gun.io/blog/multi-line-strings-in-json/. This will help.
We can always use array of strings for multiline strings like following.
{
"singleLine": "Some singleline String",
"multiline": ["Line one", "line Two", "Line Three"]
}
And we can easily iterate array to display content in multi line fashion.
While not standard, I found that some of the JSON libraries have options to support multiline Strings. I am saying this with the caveat, that this will hurt your interoperability.
However in the specific scenario I ran into, I needed to make a config file that was only ever used by one system readable and manageable by humans. And opted for this solution in the end.
Here is how this works out on Java with Jackson:
JsonMapper mapper = JsonMapper.builder()
.enable(JsonReadFeature.ALLOW_UNESCAPED_CONTROL_CHARS)
.build()
This is a very old question, but I had the same question when I wanted to improve readability of our Vega JSON Specification code which uses complex conditoinal expressions. The code is like this.
As this answer says, JSON is not designed for human. I understand that is a historical decision and it makes sense for data exchange purposes. However, JSON is still used as source code for such cases. So I asked our engineers to use Hjson for source code and process it to JSON.
For example, in Git for Windows environment,
you can download the Hjson cli binary and put it in git/bin directory to use.
Then, convert (transpile) Hjson source to JSON. To use automation tools such as Make will be useful to generate JSON.
$ which hjson
/c/Program Files/git/bin/hjson
$ cat example.hjson
{
md:
'''
First line.
Second line.
This line is indented by two spaces.
'''
}
$ hjson -j example.hjson > example.json
$ cat example.json
{
"md": "First line.\nSecond line.\n This line is indented by two spaces."
}
In case of using the transformed JSON in programming languages, language-specific libraries like hjson-js will be useful.
I noticed the same idea was posted in a duplicated question but I would share a bit more information.
You can encode at client side and decode at server side. This will take care of \n and \t characters as well
e.g. I needed to send multiline xml through json
{
"xml": "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"
}
then decode it on server side
public class XMLInput
{
public string xml { get; set; }
public string DecodeBase64()
{
var valueBytes = System.Convert.FromBase64String(this.xml);
return Encoding.UTF8.GetString(valueBytes);
}
}
public async Task<string> PublishXMLAsync([FromBody] XMLInput xmlInput)
{
string data = xmlInput.DecodeBase64();
}
once decoded you'll get your original xml
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<Structures>
<inputs>
# This program adds two numbers
num1 = 1.5
num2 = 6.3
# Add two numbers
sum = num1 + num2
# Display the sum
print('The sum of {0} and {1} is {2}'.format(num1, num2, sum))
</inputs>
</Structures>
\n\r\n worked for me !!
\n for single line break and \n\r\n for double line break
I see many answers here that may not works in most cases but may be the easiest solution if let's say you wanna output what you wrote down inside a JSON file (for example: for language translations where you wanna have just one key with more than 1 line outputted on the client) can be just adding some special characters of your choice PS: allowed by the JSON files like \\ before the new line and use some JS to parse the text ... like:
Example:
File (text.json)
{"text": "some JSON text. \\ Next line of JSON text"}
import text from 'text.json'
{text.split('\\')
.map(line => {
return (
<div>
{line}
<br />
</div>
);
})}}
Assuming the question has to do with easily editing text files and then manually converting them to json, there are two solutions I found:
hjson (that was mentioned in this previous answer), in which case you can convert your existing json file to hjson format by executing hjson source.json > target.hjson, edit in your favorite editor, and convert back to json hjson -j target.hjson > source.json. You can download the binary here or use the online conversion here.
jsonnet, which does the same, but with a slightly different format (single and double quoted strings are simply allowed to span multiple lines). Conveniently, the homepage has editable input fields so you can simply insert your multiple line json/jsonnet files there and they will be converted online to standard json immediately. Note that jsonnet supports much more goodies for templating json files, so it may be useful to look into, depending on your needs.
The reason OP asked is the same reason I ended up here. Had a json file with long text.
In VS Code it's just ALT+Z to turn on word wrapping in a json file. Changing the actual data isn't what you want, if all you really want is to read the contents of the file as a developer.
If it's just for presentation in your editor you may use ` instead of " or '
const obj = {
myMultiLineString: `This is written in a \
multiline way. \
The backside of it is that you \
can't use indentation on every new \
line because is would be included in \
your string. \
The backslash after each line escapes the carriage return.
`
}
Examples:
console.log(`First line \
Second line`);
will put in console:
First line Second line
console.log(`First line
second line`);
will put in console:
First line
second line
Hope this answered your question.