Define “cyclic data structures”

Question

At the JSON site it says

JSON does not support cyclic data structures, so be careful to not give cyclical structures to the JSON stringifier.

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Answer 1

If you imagine the members of the data structure laid out as a graph, a cyclic data structure is where a member refers back to another one or the structure itself.

For example:

var obj = new Object();

obj.left = new Object();

obj.left.left = obj;

This is impossible to represent in JSON, you would need to refer to the outer {} part somehow:

{ "left": { "left": ??? } }