Does JSON syntax allow duplicate keys in an object?

Question

Is this valid json?

{
    \"a\" : \"x\",
    \"a\" : \"y\"
}

http://jsonlint.com/ says yes.

http://www.json.org/ doesn\'t say anyth

Answer 1

The JSON spec says this:

An object is an unordered set of name/value pairs.

The important part here is "unordered": it implies uniqueness of keys, because the only thing you can use to refer to a specific pair is its key.

In addition, most JSON libs will deserialize JSON objects to hash maps/dictionaries, where keys are guaranteed unique. What happens when you deserialize a JSON object with duplicate keys depends on the library: in most cases, you'll either get an error, or only the last value for each duplicate key will be taken into account.

For example, in Python, json.loads('{"a": 1, "a": 2}') returns {"a": 2}.