Reading json files in C++

Question

I\'m trying to read in a JSON file. So far I have focused on using the jsoncpp library. However, the documentation is quite hard to understand for me. Could anyone

Answer 1

Essentially javascript and C++ work on two different principles. Javascript creates an "associative array" or hash table, which matches a string key, which is the field name, to a value. C++ lays out structures in memory, so the first 4 bytes are an integer, which is an age, then maybe we have a fixed-wth 32 byte string which represents the "profession".

So javascript will handle things like "age" being 18 in one record and "nineteen" in another. C++ can't. (However C++ is much faster).

So if we want to handle JSON in C++, we have to build the associative array from the ground up. Then we have to tag the values with their types. Is it an integer, a real value (probably return as "double"), boolean, a string? It follows that a JSON C++ class is quite a large chunk of code. Effectively what we are doing is implementing a bit of the javascript engine in C++. We then pass our JSON parser the JSON as a string, and it tokenises it, and gives us functions to query the JSON from C++.