Generate JSON5

[stevage]

If you're looking for features to add to cli.js, it would be useful to automatically generate JSON5 from JSON, with a few flavour flags. Stripping quotes from keys where not needed is the obvious one. (HJSON has a feature like this, but unfortunately the output is not compatible with JSON5).

[Kikketer]

This may not work but for me as a workaround I typically put the JSON in something as simple as the debugger tools on the browser. Then JSON.parse() that into a variable and then save it.

[emilebosch]

🤔 What the status on this? I literally can't find a single library that converts json to json5, even though I would love to adopt this. Or am I looking it wrong?

[jordanbtucker]

@emilebosch This library can convert JSON to JSON5. Here's a snippet of code to do this:

const JSON5 = require('json5')

const json = `{ "name": "Jane", "age": 25, "married": true }` // Or read JSON from a file into a variable.
const value = JSON.parse(json)

const json5Compact      = JSON5.stringify(value)
const json5Indented     = JSON5.stringify(value, null, 2)
const json5DoubleQuoted = JSON5.stringify(value, {space: 2, quote: '"'})

console.log(json5Compact)
console.log(json5Indented)
console.log(json5DoubleQuoted)

{name:'Jane',age:25,married:true}
{
  name: 'Jane',
  age: 25,
  married: true,
}
{
  name: "Jane",
  age: 25,
  married: true,
}

If you're looking for a CLI that does this, then this library does not have that feature.

[emilebosch]

Ah Jordan, I meant a cli indeed, sorry about that :) I do a lot of JSON processing and having it in json5 would be so easy on the eyes. Do you have anything against having a cli flag or can I just submit a PR? I was thinking of accepting stdin and a file.

[jordanbtucker]

PRs are welcome! Please make it backward compatible with the current CLI, so that it can just be a minor release.

Note that the -c, --convert option is not documented, but it exists for backward compatibility with older versions of the CLI.

[emilebosch]

Sure. Struggling with the name of the option though. Got -e for emit now. I.e emit JSON5. Can also do -r or --reverse?

json5 --emit <stdin|file>

[jordanbtucker]

-f, --format specifying json or json5 (case insensitive, default json), maybe? We'd probably also want to add -q, --quote since we have --space.