This module offers two interfaces:

• one uses a "generic tree" built from JSON_Value
• the other is a typed version that serializes / deserializes your custom data structures.

The generic JSON_Value graphs are a pain to consume and even worse to produce by hand. But they allow you to parse any JSON, even if you don’t know the structure (or can’t reproduce it in Jai because it varies).

The typed interface is what you want for most cases.

Parsing is as simple as:

// Typed version:
success, result := json_parse_string(json_str, Your_Type_To_Parse_Into);
// … or if you want to get a generic structure back:
success, result := json_parse_string(json_str);

There are also a convenience functions for parsing if the JSON data is in a file:

success, result := json_parse_file(json_filename, Your_Type_To_Parse_Into);
// … or
success, result := json_parse_file(json_filename);

See typed.jai and generic.jai for details and additional options.

If you don’t know the structure of some subfield of your Your_Type_To_Parse_Into structure, but still want to get these values from the JSON data, you can declare these fields as the generic type JSON_Value or *JSON_Value and the generic parse function will take over at that point:

Your_Type_To_Parse_Into :: struct {
	name: string;
	age: int;
	something_we_dont_know_much_about: *JSON_Value; // Whatever structure hides in the JSON, it will be parsed into JSON_Value.
}

Generating a string works the same for both interfaces:

json_str := json_write_string(my_value);

where my_value is either a JSON_Value or any other data structure.

See module.jai for details and additional parameters.

This module uses the unicode_utils module, which is included as a submodule.