yocto

A Minimal JSON Parser & Printer for Haskell, written by Alvaro J. Genial.

Synopsis

Yocto is exceedingly simple: it only exports one type, Value (which can represent any JSON-encoded data), together with a pair of functions decode & encode, which handle parsing Values from and printing them to Strings, respectively.

It's worth mentioning that Yocto handles numbers as Rationals rather than Doubles, which makes it faithful to the JSON standard and lets it handle rational numbers of arbitrary magnitude and precision.

The name is a play on metric unit prefixes: AttoJson is a tiny JSON library, and Yocto is even smaller. (The entire implementation fits within 80 lines x 80 columns.)

Motivation

Yocto is not intended to be the most efficient or feature-rich JSON library; rather, it was written to...

• Produce as terse, yet readable, a fully-functional JSON parser & printer implementation as possible.
• Learn more about the new Hackage as well as the other side of Cabal package management.
• Make playing with JSON interactively quick, convenient and fun.
• Experiment with minimalist design.

Status

The library is feature complete; it is documented using haddock and tested using QuickCheck.

Usage

The Value type is defined as follows:

data Value = Null
           | Boolean Bool
           | Number  Rational
           | String  String
           | Array   [Value]
           | Object  (Map String Value)
  deriving (Eq, Ord, Read, Show)

...and can be decoded and encoded as JSON, or constructed programmatically.

Encoding and decoding are intended to be lossless functions, such that decode . encode == id; however, note that certain Rational values, like 1/3, cannot be losslessly represented as JSON because they have infinitely repeating decimals.

Examples

Define values interactively...

$ ghci
> import Data.Map
> :load Text.JSON.Yocto
> let boolean = Boolean True
> let string  = String "Hapax Legomenon"
> let array   = Array [Number 1, Number 2, Number 3]
> let object  = Object $ fromList [("Foo", boolean), ("Bar", string), ("Qux", array)]

...and print them:

> encode boolean
true
> encode string
"Hapax Legomenon"
> encode array
[1,2,3]
> encode object
{"Bar":"Hapax Legomenon","Foo":true,"Qux":[1,2,3]}

Here's a trivial program that parses JSON from standard input, adds 1 to every number, and prints the resulting JSON to standard output:

module Main (main) where
import Text.JSON.Yocto

main = putStr . encode . increment . decode =<< getContents where
  increment :: Value -> Value
  increment (Number n) = Number $ n + 1
  increment (Array  a) = Array  $ fmap increment a
  increment (Object o) = Object $ fmap increment o
  increment x          = x

Dependencies

The only requirements are the base, containers, and parsec packages; testing requires additional packages (see yocto.cabal for details.)

License

This library is distributed under the MIT LICENSE.