Nate Cull (.social)Apr 13, 2018

Uhhh

JSON.stringify, what the HECK did you just do?

> c.values[0]
{ char: '10001',
pinyin: '',
english: [],
code: '00031',
cjkdecomp: [ 'ra', '㇑' ] }

> JSON.stringify(c.values[0])
'{"char":"10001","pinyin":"","english":"[\\n\\n]","code":"00031","cjkdecomp":"[\\n\\"ra\\",\\n\\"㇑\\"\\n]"}'

Did you just turn array-valued entities inside an object into string-valued entities....?

Is that... is that in the spec, somehow?

Show threadNate Cull (.social)Apr 13, 2018

> c.values[20000]
{ char: '壜',
pinyin: 'tan2',
english: [ 'variant of 罈|坛[tan2]' ],
code: '058DC',
cjkdecomp: [ 'a', '土', '曇' ],
ids: [ '⿰土曇' ],
analysis: '⿰土曇',
kind: 's' }

>
JSON.stringify(c.values[20000])

'{"char":"壜","pinyin":"tan2","english":"[\\n\\"variant of 罈|坛[tan2]\\"\\n]","code":"058DC","cjkdecomp":"[\\n\\"a\\",\\n\\"土\\",\\n\\"曇\\"\\n]","ids":"[\\n\\"⿰土曇\\"\\n]","analysis":"⿰土曇","kind":"s"}'

How... how the heck am I supposed to parse that up again correctly....?

Show threadNate Cull (.social)

Surely any sane person asking 'convert this JSON to a string' would expect it to convert it to a string that resembles the actual JSON...?

But this seems to be recursing over objects and turning all subproperties, themselves, into strings.....?

Who ordered that?

Why is this the default 'to JSON' routine built into Node?

What's the rational explanation that I'm missing here?

Apr 13, 2018 at 3:01amWeb
Show threadNate Cull (.social)Apr 13, 2018
Node 8.11.1, by the way. The current LTS. It's not an ancient one.
Show threadNate Cull (.social)Apr 13, 2018

And yep, that output certainly does NOT JSON.parse() back as what went in.

> JSON.parse(x)
{ char: '壜',
pinyin: 'tan2',
english: '[\n"variant of 罈|坛[tan2]"\n]',
code: '058DC',
cjkdecomp: '[\n"a",\n"土",\n"曇"\n]',
ids: '[\n"⿰土曇"\n]',
analysis: '⿰土曇',
kind: 's' }
>

Show threadNate Cull (.social)Apr 13, 2018

It turns out what I was missing from my JSON.stringify adventure was that evil mad science has its drawbacks.

Protip: although adding your own custom methods to Array.prototype may look neat and give you an exhilarating feeling of ABSOLUTE POWER, JSON.stringify does NOT like this and will turn all your arrays into strings if you do.

I don't know why it does this, probably out of sheer spite.

Show threadLew PerinApr 13, 2018
@natecull Why haven’t I heard of JavaScript prototypes being used as a malware vector?
Show threadTablesaw TablesawsenApr 13, 2018
@natecull How are you feeding this back in? It seems to be trying to escape newlines as well.
Show threadNate Cull (.social)Apr 13, 2018

@Tablesaw @[email protected] ah, I think I know what happened.

My evil fed back on me.

I added custom methods to Array.prototype, and I guess that made JSON.stringify think my arrays had to be stringed.

sigh

Oh well.

Show threadTablesaw TablesawsenApr 13, 2018
@natecull @[email protected] I suppose you could try using eval() instead of JSON.parse().
Show threadNate Cull (.social)Apr 13, 2018

@Tablesaw @[email protected]

and yep, removing my prototype extensions and putting them back as functions, stringify is good again

Sigh.

Well, it was clearly marked as evil, so I have nobody to blame but myself.

Show thread gulfie Apr 13, 2018
@natecull JSON.parse(JSON.stringify(x)) should give you a clone of x if it's a simple object like that
Show threadAurorabbitApr 13, 2018

@natecull is this node or a browser?

if node make sure your locale is set properly. you can see if your terminal supports utf8 with:

echo -e '\xe2\x82\xac'

that should output "€"

if not you'll need to set LANG
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

if browser add <meta charset=utf-8> to the <head> (before the <title> tag)

Show threadAurorabbitApr 13, 2018
@natecull you can see your current locale with locale
Show threadAurorabbitApr 13, 2018

@natecull oh it's not an encoding issue w

disregard

Show threadAngle🖇Apr 13, 2018

@natecull Rational?

THIS. IS. JAVASCRIPT!