I'm getting
/json/common.rb:156:in `parse': 783: unexpected token at '' (JSON::ParserError) while trying to parse a json file in ruby. The problem was because there were some single quotes in one of the strings:
parsed = JSON.parse("{
\"key1\":\"value1\",
\"key2\":\"value2\",
\"key3\":12345,
\"key4\":\"''value4''\",
}")
Is there a way to escape the single quotes in the strings without affect words like don't? The json is read from a file using JSON.parse(file.get_input_stream.read) that's why there are \.
The single quotes aren't your problem, your problem is that you have a stray trailing comma:
parsed = JSON.parse("{
\"key1\":\"value1\",
\"key2\":\"value2\",
\"key3\":12345,
\"key4\":\"''value4''\",
}") #--------------------^ This should not be there.
JSON doesn't allow that comma so you don't actually have a JSON file.
You should figure out where the file came from and fix that tool to produce real JSON rather than the "looks mostly like JSON" that is currently being written to the file.
i'm about to write some test for my client UI.
the weird thing, my JSON string:
{"match":"\s?5\.7\s?\<=\>\s?7","success":"null-coalesce-operator"}
used to be parsed by JSON.parse by browser(Chrome) and looks like this:
{
match: "\s?5\.7\s?\<=\>\s?7",
success:"null-coalesce-operator"
}
everything is fine,
but when i run that part by mocha within node.js env, i get:
{"match":"\s?5\.7\s?\<=\>\s?7","success":"null-coalesce-operator"}
^
SyntaxError: Unexpected token s
at Object.parse (native)
...
did anyone experienced stuff like this. thx for any tipp.
node version is v5.7.1
mocha version is 2.4.5
UPDATE html string that i test is:
<!doctype html><html><body><div data-meta="{"match":"\\s?5\\.7\\s?\\<=\\>\\s?7","success":"null-coalesce-operator"}"></div></body></html>
it just a single line string without any \n newlines and the same.
I think it is because it also parse specials characaters (e.g \n => line feed, \r => carriage return, etc), what chrome did not. So because you want an antislash in you regex, before parsing in node, you need to replace each\ by \\:
json_string = json_string.replace(new RegExp('\\\\', 'g'), '\\\\') //we have to use regex, because when using replace with string, it only replaces the first occurence...
otherwise, when parsing, it will tell, à \s : 'It is a special character, identified by s. But I haven't any tokens s. So I throw an error."
I'm having trouble properly escaping a string I'm trying to use to represent JSON in Erlang. I'm not sure why this particular sequence is giving the parser trouble. I have this string in a Basho Bench configuration file.
'{
"stats":"completed",
"times":[
{
"time":"2014-10-29T23:40:46.558Z"
}
]
}'
I am getting this error:
23:37:18.521 [error] Failed to parse config file server/http.config.erl: {29,erl_scan,{illegal,atom}}
It seems like maybe the issue is the numbers in the string but I don't get how I would escape them. Any thoughts?
You provided insufficient info but anyway, server/http.config.erl is not JSON. It is erlang term, so this error is from Erlang parser. The whole text you provided is parsed as atom because of ' which is delimiter for atoms.
The string is not a string. Single quotes denote an atom. It must be wrapped in double quotes to be interpreted as a string.
Here is my string
{
'user': {
'name': 'abc',
'fx': {
'message': {
'color': 'red'
},
'user': {
'color': 'blue'
}
}
},
'timestamp': '2013-10-04T08: 10: 41+0100',
'message': 'I'mABC..',
'nanotime': '19993363098581330'
}
Here the message contains single quotation mark, which is same as the quotation used in JSON. What I do is fill up a string from user inputs such as message. So, I need to escape those kind of special scenarios which breaks the code. But other than string replace, is there any way to make them escape but still allow HTML to process them back to the correct message?
I'm appalled by the presence of highly-upvoted misinformation on such a highly-viewed question about a basic topic.
JSON strings cannot be quoted with single quotes. The various versions of the spec (the original by Douglas Crockford, the ECMA version, and the IETF version) all state that strings must be quoted with double quotes. This is not a theoretical issue, nor a matter of opinion as the accepted answer currently suggests; any JSON parser in the real world will error out if you try to have it parse a single-quoted string.
Crockford's and ECMA's version even display the definition of a string using a pretty picture, which should make the point unambiguously clear:
The pretty picture also lists all of the legitimate escape sequences within a JSON string:
\"
\\
\/
\b
\f
\n
\r
\t
\u followed by four-hex-digits
Note that, contrary to the nonsense in some other answers here, \' is never a valid escape sequence in a JSON string. It doesn't need to be, because JSON strings are always double-quoted.
Finally, you shouldn't normally have to think about escaping characters yourself when programatically generating JSON (though of course you will when manually editing, say, a JSON-based config file). Instead, form the data structure you want to encode using whatever native map, array, string, number, boolean, and null types your language has, and then encode it to JSON with a JSON-encoding function. Such a function is probably built into whatever language you're using, like JavaScript's JSON.stringify, PHP's json_encode, or Python's json.dumps. If you're using a language that doesn't have such functionality built in, you can probably find a JSON parsing and encoding library to use. If you simply use language or library functions to convert things to and from JSON, you'll never even need to know JSON's escaping rules. This is what the misguided question asker here ought to have done.
A JSON string must be double-quoted, according to the specs, so you don't need to escape '.
If you have to use special character in your JSON string, you can escape it using \ character.
See this list of special character used in JSON :
\b Backspace (ascii code 08)
\f Form feed (ascii code 0C)
\n New line
\r Carriage return
\t Tab
\" Double quote
\\ Backslash character
However, even if it is totally contrary to the spec, the author could use \'.
This is bad because :
It IS contrary to the specs
It is no-longer JSON valid string
But it works, as you want it or not.
For new readers, always use a double quotes for your json strings.
Everyone is talking about how to escape ' in a '-quoted string literal. There's a much bigger issue here: single-quoted string literals aren't valid JSON. JSON is based on JavaScript, but it's not the same thing. If you're writing an object literal inside JavaScript code, fine; if you actually need JSON, you need to use ".
With double-quoted strings, you won't need to escape the '. (And if you did want a literal " in the string, you'd use \".)
Most of these answers either does not answer the question or is unnecessarily long in the explanation.
OK so JSON only uses double quotation marks, we get that!
I was trying to use JQuery AJAX to post JSON data to server and then later return that same information.
The best solution to the posted question I found was to use:
var d = {
name: 'whatever',
address: 'whatever',
DOB: '01/01/2001'
}
$.ajax({
type: "POST",
url: 'some/url',
dataType: 'json',
data: JSON.stringify(d),
...
}
This will escape the characters for you.
This was also suggested by Mark Amery, Great answer BTW
Hope this helps someone.
May be i am too late to the party but this will parse/escape single quote (don't want to get into a battle on parse vs escape)..
JSON.parse("\"'\"")
The answer the direct question:
To be safe, replace the required character with \u+4-digit-hex-value
Example:
If you want to escape the apostrophe ' replace with \u0027
D'Amico becomes D\u0027Amico
NICE REFERENCE:
http://es5.github.io/x7.html#x7.8.4
https://mathiasbynens.be/notes/javascript-escapes
Using template literals...
var json = `{"1440167924916":{"id":1440167924916,"type":"text","content":"It's a test!"}}`;
Use encodeURIComponent() to encode the string.
Eg.:
var product_list = encodeURIComponent(JSON.stringify(product_list));
You don't need to decode it since the web server automatically do the same.
To allow single quotes within doubule quoted string for the purpose of json, you double the single quote. {"X": "What's the question"} ==> {"X": "What''s the question"}
https://codereview.stackexchange.com/questions/69266/json-conversion-to-single-quotes
The \' sequence is invalid.
regarding AlexB's post:
\' Apostrophe or single quote
\" Double quote
escaping single quotes is only valid in single quoted json strings
escaping double quotes is only valid in double quoted json strings
example:
'Bart\'s car' -> valid
'Bart says \"Hi\"' -> invalid
I'm attempting to look up the word "flower" in Google's dictionary semi-api. Source:
https://gist.github.com/DelvarWorld/0a83a42abbc1297a6687
Long story short, I'm calling JSONP with a callback paramater then regexing it out.
But it hits this snag:
undefined:1
ple","terms":[{"type":"text","text":"I stopped to buy Bridget some \x3cem\x3ef
^
SyntaxError: Unexpected token x
at Object.parse (native)
Google is serving me escaped HTML characters, which is fine, but JSON.parse cannot handle them?? What's weirding me out is this works just fine:
$ node
> JSON.parse( '{"a":"\x3cem"}' )
{ a: '<em' }
I don't get why my thingle is crashing
Edit These are all nice informational repsonses, but none of them help me get rid of the stacktrace.
\xHH is not part of JSON, but is part of JavaScript. It is equivalent to \u00HH. Since the built-in JSON doesn't seem to support it and I doubt you'd want to go through the trouble of modifying a non-built-in JSON implementation, you might just want to run the code in a sandbox and collect the resulting object.
According to http://json.org, a string character in a JSON representation of string may be:
any-Unicode-character-
except-"-or--or-
control-character
\"
\
\/
\b
\f
\n
\r
\t
\u four-hex-digits
So according to that list, the "json" you are getting is malformed at \x3
The reason why it works is because these two are equivalent.
JSON.parse( '{"a":"\x3cem"}' )
and
JSON.parse( '{"a":"<em"}' )
you string is passed to JSON.parse already decoded since its a literal \x3cem is actually <em
Now, \xxx is valid in JavaScript but not in JSON, according to http://json.org/ the only characters you can have after a \ are "\/bfnrtu.
answer is correct, but needs couple of modifications. you might wanna try this one: https://gist.github.com/Selmanh/6973863