Are multi-line strings allowed in JSON

Question

Is it possible to have multi-line strings in JSON  It s mostly for visual comfort so I suppose I can just turn word wrap on in my editor  but I m just kinda curious  I m writing some data files in JSON format and would like to have some really long string values split over multiple lines  Using python s JSON module I get a whole lot of errors  whether I use   or  n as an escape

User · Answer

JSON doesn t allow breaking lines for readability   Your best bet is to use an IDE that will line-wrap for you

User · Answer

Check out the specification  The JSON grammar s char production can take the following values    any-Unicode-character-except- -or- -or-control-character           b  f  n  r  t  u four-hex-digits   Newlines are  control characters  so  no  you may not have a literal newline within your string  However you may encode it using whatever combination of  n and  r you require

User · Answer

While not standard  I found that some of the JSON libraries have options to support multiline Strings  I am saying this with the caveat  that this will hurt your interoperability  However in the specific scenario I ran into  I needed to make a config file that was only ever used by one system readable and manageable by humans  And opted for this solution in the end  Here is how this works out on Java with Jackson  JsonMapper mapper   JsonMapper builder       enable JsonReadFeature ALLOW UNESCAPED CONTROL CHARS      build

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Write property value as a array of strings  Like example given over here https   gun io blog multi-line-strings-in-json   This will help   We can always use array of strings for multiline strings like following          singleLine    Some singleline String        multiline     Line one    line Two    Line Three        And we can easily iterate array to display content in multi line fashion

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I have had to do this for a small Node js project and found this work-around       modify head          lt script type  text javascript  gt        lt  --        function drawSomeText id           var pjs   Processing getInstanceById id          var text   document getElementById  inputtext   value         pjs drawText text         -- gt        lt  script gt           modify body          lt input type  text  id  inputtext  gt  lt  input gt        lt button onclick drawSomeText  ExampleCanvas   gt  lt  button gt            This looks quite neat to me  appart from that I have to use double quotes everywhere  Though otherwise  I could  perhaps  use YAML  but that has other pitfalls and is not supported natively  Once parsed  I just use myData modify head join   n   or myData modify head join    depending upon whether I want a line break after each string or not

User · Answer

Try this  it also handles the single quote which is failed to parse by JSON parse   method and also supports the UTF-8 character code      parseJSON   function             var data               var reader   new FileReader            reader onload   function                 try                   data   JSON parse reader result replace    g   quot   quot  quot                   catch  ex                    console log  error    ex                                    reader readAsText fileSelector test 0  files 0    utf-8

User · Answer

JSON does not allow real line-breaks  You need to replace all the line breaks with  n   eg     first line second line   can saved with    first line nsecond line   Note   for Python  this should be written as    first line  nsecond line   where    is for escaping the backslash  otherwise python will treat  n as  the control character  new line

User · Answer

Unfortunately many of the answers here address the question of how to put a newline character in the string data   The question is how to make the code look nicer by splitting the string value across multiple lines of code    And even the answers that recognize this provide  solutions  that assume one is free to change the data representation  which in many cases one is not    And the worse news is  there is no good answer   In many programming languages  even if they don t explicitly support splitting strings across lines  you can still use string concatenation to get the desired effect  and as long as the compiler isn t awful this is fine   But json is not a programming language  it s just a data representation   You can t tell it to concatenate strings   Nor does its  fairly small  grammar include any facility for representing a string on multiple lines   Short of devising a pre-processor of some kind  and I  for one  don t feel like effectively making up my own language to solve this issue   there isn t a general solution to this problem   IF you can change the data format  then you can substitute an array of strings   Otherwise  this is one of the numerous ways that json isn t designed for human-readability

User · Answer

This is a really old question  but I came across this on a search and I think I know the source of your problem   JSON does not allow  real  newlines in its data  it can only have escaped newlines  See the answer from  YOU  According to the question  it looks like you attempted to escape line breaks in Python two ways  by using the line continuation character       or by using   n  as an escape   But keep in mind  if you are using a string in python  special escaped characters    t     n   are translated into REAL control characters  The   n  will be replaced with the ASCII control character representing a newline character  which is precisely the character that is illegal in JSON   As for the line continuation character  it simply takes the newline out    So what you need to do is to prevent Python from escaping characters  You can do this by using a raw string  put r in front of the string  as in r abc ndef   or by including an extra slash in front of the newline   abc  ndef     Both of the above will  instead of replacing   n  with the real newline ASCII control character  will leave   n  as two literal characters  which then JSON can interpret as a newline escape

[json] Are multi-line strings allowed in JSON?

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