RAruler
deechI just stumbled across this hack for adding comments in JSON and there is no greater testament to human ingenuity and endurance in the face of adversity.
your friend patrick šµšø@deech Jesus.
David Mankins
Marco@deech life finds a way
Jonathan Hartley's old account@deech omg! Why is it an array though? To conform to a contextual schema, I suppose?
Dmitri āļø@analog_cafe @deech oh yes, thank you!
Stefan Monnier@deech
In which sense is this a comment?
In which sense is this a comment?
Andrew Drake
Dawn AhukannaI usually do this:
{
āAuthorā:āā¦ā,
āAuthorCommentā:āThis is a comment for Authorā,
}
Michael Hartle@deech JSON5 extends the JSON syntax, allowing for single and multiline comments (https://json5.org/)
Mark Stosberg@deech There several variants of JSON that allow comments.
YAML is a superset of JSON but is also more complex. Then thereās JSON5, HuJSON and JSONC, JWCC and more but none are widely popular.
https://nigeltao.github.io/blog/2021/json-with-commas-comments.html
masukomi (š²)
Marcos Dione@deech I don't quite get it, is `//` anything special, of just something with as a silly name as any random set of Latin letters that would just make the consumer ignore it? And why a list? A scalar is not enough? And isn't the trailing comma after the string a Syntax Error?
David Zaslavsky@mdione @deech It's just a key that the consumer is likely to ignore. And somebody pointed out elsewhere in the thread that the value of using an array is to make the "comment" appear on multiple lines when the JSON is formatted in a human-readable way.
I think the trailing comma would be a syntax error, yeah, but IMO the image makes its point well enough even if you ignore that.
Graham Lea@deech Itās so easy to just use JSON5. I donāt know why everybody doesnāt just use JSON5. (For content thatās expected to be human written and readable.)
@evolvable @deech approximately none of the tools Iāve used that take JSON inputs will accept JSON5 or JSONC or anything but pure JSON, so I canāt ājust use JSON5ā Iād have to convince an awful lot of people to change software they publish and have to wait for the updated versions to be released and compatible with everything I need them to interact with. I canāt speak for anyone else, but thatās why I donāt; ācause itās not actually so easy
@ShadSterling @evolvable @deech I'm pretty sure you're speaking for a *lot* of other people, even if very few of them are in a position to identify themselves here
@diazona @ShadSterling
Sorry, I actually meant people writing software that ingests JSON should just ingest JSON5 instead, as that is generally a trivial change.
My bad, I didnāt explain what I meant very well.
@deech
Sorry, I actually meant people writing software that ingests JSON should just ingest JSON5 instead, as that is generally a trivial change.
My bad, I didnāt explain what I meant very well.
@deech
Katerina MarchĆ”n@deech @shanselman fun fact: while this isnāt āofficialā comment syntax, NPM accepts it in package.json. So, if you have it in your ādependenciesā fields, those ācommentsā will be ignored. At least, this was true 5 years ago.
Gord
David Whittemore@deech dear god
mrangeI used to to do the double "declare" to do comments but relies on the parser picking the right value which is not portable. This scheme I think is better
Ćlvaro Herrera@deech Hmm, but this means you can have only one comment in an object, because an object can contain only one element with a given key, no?
Ahh š” but actually you could also have "//1": "I am the second comment" in the same object!
nil 
@ FURG@deech until the app complains about an unexpected element in the json object..
Jes Moved to @@deech ez, make a macro that types this in in a fraction of a second
Vel, Velvet, Velveteen
Tim M@deech We accept "-// arg" and "-//=arg" etc as command line options that are just comments in all our test programs so that if we have some complicated command line of options set up for debugging etc we can "comment out" some of those option to temporarily remove them non-destructively.
Also helps to comment label commands in bash history etc (altho TBH I tend to use '_="some comment label" some-command args ...' for that instead)
Also helps to comment label commands in bash history etc (altho TBH I tend to use '_="some comment label" some-command args ...' for that instead)
Haelwenn /ŃŠ»Š²ŃŠ½/ 
@deech Reminds me that I wonder how the different ASTs used by formatters/linters/ā¦ store comments.
RefCell { value: <borrowed> }@lanodan @deech you can use a "red-green syntax tree", a flexible trees structure whose leaves are tokens (incl. comments and whitespace) and whose nodes group tokens and other nodes together. They are loosely typed and can losslessly represent invalid syntax, whitespace and comments.
They're usually used to implement error-tolerant language servers but can work for formatters too.
They're usually used to implement error-tolerant language servers but can work for formatters too.
Nebyoolae@deech Just added a comment to a project's JSON file and now I feel empowered to do anything.
emily, blinkenlight witch@deech I have also seen pairs of keys called "thing" and "//thing", where the former is data and the latter is human readable documentation
StevanFreeborn