Can comments be used in JSON?

Question

Can I use comments inside a JSON file? If so, how?

Answer 1

No.

The JSON is data only, and if you include a comment, then it will be data too.

You could have a designated data element called "_comment" (or something) that should be ignored by apps that use the JSON data.

You would probably be better having the comment in the processes that generates/receives the JSON, as they are supposed to know what the JSON data will be in advance, or at least the structure of it.

But if you decided to:

{
   "_comment": "comment text goes here...",
   "glossary": {
      "title": "example glossary",
      "GlossDiv": {
         "title": "S",
         "GlossList": {
            "GlossEntry": {
               "ID": "SGML",
               "SortAs": "SGML",
               "GlossTerm": "Standard Generalized Markup Language",
               "Acronym": "SGML",
               "Abbrev": "ISO 8879:1986",
               "GlossDef": {
                  "para": "A meta-markup language, used to create markup languages such as DocBook.",
                  "GlossSeeAlso": ["GML", "XML"]
               },
               "GlossSee": "markup"
            }
         }
      }
   }
}

Answer 2

Comments were removed from JSON by design.

I removed comments from JSON because I saw people were using them to hold parsing directives, a practice which would have destroyed interoperability. I know that the lack of comments makes some people sad, but it shouldn't.

Suppose you are using JSON to keep configuration files, which you would like to annotate. Go ahead and insert all the comments you like. Then pipe it through JSMin before handing it to your JSON parser.

Source: Public statement by Douglas Crockford on G+

Answer 3

If you are using the Newtonsoft.Json library with ASP.NET to read/deserialize you can use comments in the JSON content:

//"name": "string"

//"id": int

or

/* This is a

comment example */

PS: Single-line comments are only supported with 6+ versions of Newtonsoft Json.

Additional note for people who can't think out of the box: I use the JSON format for basic settings in an ASP.NET web application I made. I read the file, convert it into the settings object with the Newtonsoft library and use it when necessary.

I prefer writing comments about each individual setting in the JSON file itself, and I really don't care about the integrity of the JSON format as long as the library I use is OK with it.

I think this is an 'easier to use/understand' way than creating a separate 'settings.README' file and explaining the settings in it.

If you have a problem with this kind of usage; sorry, the genie is out of the lamp. People would find other usages for JSON format, and there is nothing you can do about it.

Answer 4

The idea behind JSON is to provide simple data exchange between applications. These are typically web based and the language is JavaScript.

It doesn't really allow for comments as such, however, passing a comment as one of the name/value pairs in the data would certainly work, although that data would obviously need to be ignored or handled specifically by the parsing code.

All that said, it's not the intention that the JSON file should contain comments in the traditional sense. It should just be the data.

Have a look at the JSON website for more detail.

Answer 5

You can have comments in JSONP, but not in pure JSON. I've just spent an hour trying to make my program work with this example from Highcharts: http://www.highcharts.com/samples/data/jsonp.php?filename=aapl-c.json&callback=?

If you follow the link, you will see

?(/* AAPL historical OHLC data from the Google Finance API */
[
/* May 2006 */
[1147651200000,67.79],
[1147737600000,64.98],
...
[1368057600000,456.77],
[1368144000000,452.97]
]);

Since I had a similar file in my local folder, there were no issues with the Same-origin policy, so I decided to use pure JSON... and, of course, $.getJSON was failing silently because of the comments.

Eventually I just sent a manual HTTP request to the address above and realized that the content-type was text/javascript since, well, JSONP returns pure JavaScript. In this case comments are allowed. But my application returned content-type application/json, so I had to remove the comments.

Answer 6

JSON does not support comments natively, but you can make your own decoder or at least preprocessor to strip out comments, that's perfectly fine (as long as you just ignore comments and don't use them to guide how your application should process the JSON data).

JSON does not have comments. A JSON encoder MUST NOT output comments. A JSON decoder MAY accept and ignore comments.

Comments should never be used to transmit anything meaningful. That is what JSON is for.

Cf: Douglas Crockford, author of JSON spec.