Re: Proposal: Add JSON support

On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 8:33 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 8:23 PM, Mike Rylander <mrylander@gmail.com> wrote:
>> In practice, every parser/serializer I've used (including the one I
>> helped write) allows (and, often, forces) any non-ASCII character to
>> be encoded as \u followed by a string of four hex digits.
>
> Is it correct to say that the only feasible place where non-ASCII
> characters can be used is within string constants?

Yes.  That includes object property strings -- they are quoted string literals.

> If so, it might be
> reasonable to disallow characters with the high-bit set unless the
> server encoding is one of the flavors of Unicode of which the spec
> approves.  I'm tempted to think that when the server encoding is
> Unicode we really ought to allow Unicode characters natively, because
> turning a long string of two-byte wide chars into a long string of
> six-byte wide chars sounds pretty evil from a performance point of
> view.
>

+1

As an aside, \u-encoded (escaped) characters and native multi-byte
sequences (of any RFC-allowable Unicode encoding) are exactly
equivalent in JSON -- it's a storage and transmission format, and
doesn't prescribe the application-internal representation of the data.

If it's faster (which it almost certainly is) to not mangle the data
when it's all staying server side, that seems like a useful
optimization.  For output to the client, however, it would be useful
to provide a \u-escaping function, which (AIUI) should always be safe
regardless of client encoding.

--
Mike Rylander| VP, Research and Design| Equinox Software, Inc. / The Evergreen Experts| phone:  1-877-OPEN-ILS
(673-6457)|email:  miker@esilibrary.com| web:  http://www.esilibrary.com