Can comments be used in JSON

Question

Can I use comments inside a JSON file  If so  how

User · Answer

The Dojo Toolkit JavaScript toolkit  at least as of version 1 4   allows you to include comments in your JSON  The comments can be of       format  Dojo Toolkit consumes the JSON via the dojo xhrGet   call   Other JavaScript toolkits may work similarly   This can be helpful when experimenting with alternate data structures  or even data lists  before choosing a final option

User · Answer

Not technically  But you can workaround as follows        json    actual data goes here  comments below      comment1    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet      comment2    consectetur adipiscing elit      Just put the comments in the data  If you number them to make each key path unique  you should have no problems

User · Answer

If you are using the Newtonsoft Json library with ASP NET to read deserialize you can use comments in the JSON content      quot name quot    quot string quot     quot id quot   int  or     This is a comment example     PS  Single-line comments are only supported with 6  versions of Newtonsoft Json  Additional note for people who can t think out of the box  I use the JSON format for basic settings in an ASP NET web application I made  I read the file  convert it into the settings object with the Newtonsoft library and use it when necessary  I prefer writing comments about each individual setting in the JSON file itself  and I really don t care about the integrity of the JSON format as long as the library I use is OK with it  I think this is an  easier to use understand  way than creating a separate  settings README  file and explaining the settings in it  If you have a problem with this kind of usage  sorry  the genie is out of the lamp  People would find other usages for JSON format  and there is nothing you can do about it

User · Answer

Here is what I found in the Google Firebase documentation that allows you to put comments in JSON              Some browsers will use this to enable push notifications             It is the same for all projects  this is not your project s sender ID      gcm sender id    1234567890

User · Answer

I just found  grunt-strip-json-comments          Strip comments from JSON  It lets you use comments in your JSON files                Rainbows      unicorn            cake

User · Answer

JSON makes a lot of sense for config files and other local usage because it s ubiquitous and because it s much simpler than XML    If people have strong reasons against having comments in JSON when communicating data  whether valid or not   then possibly JSON could be split into two    JSON-COM  JSON on the wire  or rules that apply when communicating JSON data  JSON-DOC  JSON document  or JSON in files or locally  Rules that define a valid JSON document    JSON-DOC will allow comments  and other minor differences might exist such as handling whitespace  Parsers can easily convert from one spec to the other    With regards to the remark made by Douglas Crockford on this issues  referenced by  Artur Czajka      Suppose you are using JSON to keep configuration files  which you would like to annotate  Go ahead and insert all the comments you like  Then pipe it through JSMin before handing it to your JSON parser    We re talking about a generic config file issue  cross language platform   and he s answering with a JS specific utility   Sure a JSON specific minify can be implemented in any language  but standardize this so it becomes ubiquitous across parsers in all languages and platforms so people stop wasting their time lacking the feature because they have good use-cases for it  looking the issue up in online forums  and getting people telling them it s a bad idea or suggesting it s easy to implement stripping comments out of text files   The other issue is interoperability  Suppose you have a library or API or any kind of subsystem which has some config or data files associated with it  And this subsystem is to be accessed from different languages   Then do you go about telling people  by the way don t forget to strip out the comments from the JSON files before passing them to the parser

User · Answer

You should write a JSON schema instead  JSON schema is currently a proposed Internet draft specification  Besides documentation  the schema can also be used for validating your JSON data   Example          description   A person        type   object        properties                          name                                          type   string                                  age                                          type   integer                        maximum  125                                 You can provide documentation by using the description schema attribute

User · Answer

You can t  At least that s my experience from a quick glance at json org   JSON has its syntax visualized on that page  There isn t any note about comments

User · Answer

Sigh  Why not just add fields  e g          note1     This demonstrates the provision of annotations within a JSON file        field1    12       field2     some text         note2     Add more annotations as necessary      Just make sure your  notex  names don t conflict with any real fields

User · Answer

Sure you can comment JSON  To read a commented JSON file from JavaScript you can strip comments before parsing it  see the code below    I m sure this code can be improved  but it is easy to understand for those who use regular expressions  I use commented JSON files to specify neuron shapes for my synthetic reflex systems   I also use commented JSON to store intermediate states for a running neuron system   It is very convenient to have comments   Don t listen to didacts who tell you they are a bad idea  fetch filename  then function response        return response text       then function commented        return commented          replace        s S                          gm    1            replace   r   quot  n quot            replace   n  n     quot  n quot       then function clean        return JSON parse clean      then function json           Do what you want with the JSON object

User · Answer

Comments were removed from JSON by design   I removed comments from JSON because I saw people were using them to hold parsing directives  a practice which would have destroyed interoperability  I know that the lack of comments makes some people sad  but it shouldn t  Suppose you are using JSON to keep configuration files  which you would like to annotate  Go ahead and insert all the comments you like  Then pipe it through JSMin before handing it to your JSON parser   Source  Public statement by Douglas Crockford on G

User · Answer

No  comments of the form       or         are not allowed in JSON  This answer is based on   https   www json org RFC 4627  The application json Media Type for JavaScript Object Notation  JSON  RFC 8259 The JavaScript Object Notation  JSON  Data Interchange Format  supercedes RFCs 4627  7158  7159

User · Answer

This is a  can you  question  And here is a  yes  answer   No  you shouldn t use duplicative object members to stuff side channel data into a JSON encoding   See  The names within an object SHOULD be unique  in the RFC    And yes  you could insert comments around the JSON  which you could parse out   But if you want a way of inserting and extracting arbitrary side-channel data to a valid JSON  here is an answer  We take advantage of the non-unique representation of data in a JSON encoding  This is allowed  in section two of the RFC under  whitespace is allowed before or after any of the six structural characters     The RFC only states  whitespace is allowed before or after any of the six structural characters   not explicitly mentioning strings  numbers   false    true   and  null   This omission is ignored in ALL implementations     First  canonicalize your JSON by minifying it    jsonMin   json encode json decode  json      Then encode your comment in binary    hex   unpack  H     comment    commentBinary   base convert  hex 1   16  2     Then steg your binary    steg   str replace  0         commentBinary    steg   str replace  1     t    steg     Here is your output    jsonWithComment    steg    jsonMin

User · Answer

I just found  grunt-strip-json-comments          Strip comments from JSON  It lets you use comments in your JSON files                Rainbows      unicorn            cake

User · Answer

Disclaimer  This is silly There is actually a way to add comments  and stay within the specification  no additional parser needed   It will not result into human-readable comments without any sort of parsing though  You could abuse the following   Insignificant whitespace is allowed before or after any token  Whitespace is any sequence of one or more of the following code points  character tabulation  U 0009   line feed  U 000A   carriage return  U 000D   and space  U 0020    In a hacky way  you can abuse this to add a comment  For instance  start and end your comment with a tab  Encode the comment in base3 and use the other whitespace characters to represent them  For instance  010212 010202 011000 011000 011010 001012 010122 010121 011021 010202 001012 011022 010212 011020 010202 010202   hello base three in ASCII  But instead of 0 use space  for 1 use line feed and for 2 use carriage return  This will just leave you with a lot of unreadable whitespace  unless you make an IDE plugin to encode decode it on the fly   I never even tried this  for obvious reasons and neither should you

User · Answer

The JSON specification does not support comments     or       style  But some JSON parsing libraries and IDEs support them  Like   JSON5 Visual Studio Code Commentjson

User · Answer

You can have comments in JSONP  but not in pure JSON  I ve just spent an hour trying to make my program work with this example from Highcharts  http   www highcharts com samples data jsonp php filename aapl-c json amp callback    If you follow the link  you will see       AAPL historical OHLC data from the Google Finance API         May 2006     1147651200000 67 79    1147737600000 64 98        1368057600000 456 77    1368144000000 452 97        Since I had a similar file in my local folder  there were no issues with the Same-origin policy  so I decided to use pure JSON    and  of course    getJSON was failing silently because of the comments   Eventually I just sent a manual HTTP request to the address above and realized that the content-type was text javascript since  well  JSONP returns pure JavaScript  In this case comments are allowed  But my application returned content-type application json  so I had to remove the comments

User · Answer

JSON is not a framed protocol  It is a language free format  So a comment s format is not defined for JSON   As many people have suggested  there are some tricks  for example  duplicate keys or a specific key  comment that you can use  It s up to you

User · Answer

The author of JSON wants us to include comments in the JSON  but strip them out before parsing them  see link provided by Michael Burr   If JSON should have comments  why not standardize them  and let the JSON parser do the job  I don t agree with the logic there  but  alas  that s the standard  Using a YAML solution as suggested by others is good  but it requires a library dependency   If you want to strip out comments  but don t want to have a library dependency  here is a two-line solution  which works for C  -style comments  but can be adapted to others   var comments   new RegExp          mg    data   JSON parse fs readFileSync sample file   utf8   replace comments          Note that this solution can only be used in cases where you can be sure that the JSON data does not contain the comment initiator  e g           Another way to achieve JSON parsing  stripping of comments  and no extra library  is to evaluate the JSON in a JavaScript interpreter  The caveat with that approach  of course  is that you would only want to evaluate untainted data  no untrusted user-input   Here is an example of this approach in Node js -- another caveat  the following example will only read the data once and then it will be cached   data   require fs realpathSync doctree fp

User · Answer

The idea behind JSON is to provide simple data exchange between applications  These are typically web based and the language is JavaScript   It doesn t really allow for comments as such  however  passing a comment as one of the name value pairs in the data would certainly work  although that data would obviously need to be ignored or handled specifically by the parsing code   All that said  it s not the intention that the JSON file should contain comments in the traditional sense  It should just be the data   Have a look at the JSON website for more detail

User · Answer

JSON does not support comments natively  but you can make your own decoder or at least preprocessor to strip out comments  that s perfectly fine  as long as you just ignore comments and don t use them to guide how your application should process the JSON data       JSON does not have comments  A JSON encoder MUST NOT output comments    A JSON decoder MAY accept and ignore comments       Comments should never be used to transmit anything meaningful  That is   what JSON is for    Cf  Douglas Crockford  author of JSON spec

User · Answer

You can t  At least that s my experience from a quick glance at json org   JSON has its syntax visualized on that page  There isn t any note about comments

User · Answer

I just encountering this for configuration files  I don t want to use XML  verbose  graphically  ugly  hard to read   or  ini  format  no hierarchy  no real standard  etc   or Java  Properties  format  like  ini    JSON can do all they can do  but it is way less verbose and more human readable - and parsers are easy and ubiquitous in many languages  It s just a tree of data  But out-of-band comments are a necessity often to document  default  configurations and the like  Configurations are never to be  full documents   but trees of saved data that can be human readable when needed   I guess one could use       comment   for  valid  JSON

User · Answer

We are using strip-json-comments for our project  It supports something like         Description              rainbows      unicorn            cake      Simply npm install --save strip-json-comments to install and use it like   var strip json comments   require  strip-json-comments   var json       rainbows   unicorn   cake     JSON parse strip json comments json        gt   unicorn   cake

User · Answer

No  The JSON is data only  and if you include a comment  then it will be data too  You could have a designated data element called  quot  comment quot   or something  that should be ignored by apps that use the JSON data  You would probably be better having the comment in the processes that generates receives the JSON  as they are supposed to know what the JSON data will be in advance  or at least the structure of it  But if you decided to        quot  comment quot    quot comment text goes here    quot       quot glossary quot            quot title quot    quot example glossary quot          quot GlossDiv quot               quot title quot    quot S quot             quot GlossList quot                  quot GlossEntry quot                     quot ID quot    quot SGML quot                   quot SortAs quot    quot SGML quot                   quot GlossTerm quot    quot Standard Generalized Markup Language quot                   quot Acronym quot    quot SGML quot                   quot Abbrev quot    quot ISO 8879 1986 quot                   quot GlossDef quot                        quot para quot    quot A meta-markup language  used to create markup languages such as DocBook  quot                      quot GlossSeeAlso quot     quot GML quot    quot XML quot                                     quot GlossSee quot    quot markup quot

User · Answer

Yes  the new standard  JSON5 allows the C   style comments  among many other extensions     A single line comment      A multi-    line comment      The JSON5 Data Interchange Format  JSON5  is a superset of JSON that aims to alleviate some of the limitations of JSON  It is fully backwards compatible  and using it is probably better than writing the custom non standard parser  turning non standard features on for the existing one or using various hacks like string fields for commenting  Or  if the parser in use supports  simply agree we are using JSON 5 subset that is JSON and C   style comments  It is much better than we tweak JSON standard the way we see fit  There is already npm package  Python package  Java package and C library available  It is backwards compatible  I see no reason to stay with the  quot official quot  JSON restrictions  I think that removing comments from JSON has been driven by the same reasons as removing the operator overloading in Java  can be used the wrong way yet some clearly legitimate use cases were overlooked  For operator overloading  it is matrix algebra and complex numbers  For JSON comments  its is configuration files and other documents that may be written  edited or read by humans and not just by parser

User · Answer

Here is what I found in the Google Firebase documentation that allows you to put comments in JSON              Some browsers will use this to enable push notifications             It is the same for all projects  this is not your project s sender ID      gcm sender id    1234567890

User · Answer

If your context is Node js configuration  you might consider JavaScript via module exports as an alternative to JSON   module exports          key    value           And with comments       key2    value2       The require syntax will still be the same  Being JavaScript  the file extension should be  js

User · Answer

DISCLAIMER  YOUR WARRANTY IS VOID  As has been pointed out  this hack takes advantage of the implementation of the spec  Not all JSON parsers will understand this sort of JSON  Streaming parsers in particular will choke   It s an interesting curiosity  but you should really not be using it for anything at all  Below is the original answer     I ve found a little hack that allows you to place comments in a JSON file that will not affect the parsing  or alter the data being represented in any way   It appears that when declaring an object literal you can specify two values with the same key  and the last one takes precedence  Believe it or not  it turns out that JSON parsers work the same way  So we can use this to create comments in the source JSON that will not be present in a parsed object representation      a  1  a  2         gt  Object  a  2  Object keys JSON parse    a   1   a   2     length        gt  1   If we apply this technique  your commented JSON file might look like this        api host     The hostname of your API server  You may also specify the port       api host     hodorhodor com       retry interval     The interval in seconds between retrying failed API calls      retry interval    10      auth token     The authentication token  It is available in your developer dashboard under  Settings       auth token     5ad0eb93697215bc0d48a7b69aa6fb8b       favorite numbers    An array containing my all-time favorite numbers      favorite numbers    19  13  53      The above code is valid JSON  If you parse it  you ll get an object like this          api host    hodorhodor com        retry interval   10       auth token    5ad0eb93697215bc0d48a7b69aa6fb8b        favorite numbers    19 13 53      Which means there is no trace of the comments  and they won t have weird side-effects   Happy hacking

User · Answer

Yes   You can put comments in a JSON file              Location to post to        postUrl    https   example com upload              Username for basic auth        username    joebloggs             Password for basic auth  note this is in clear  be sure to use HTTPS         password    bloejoggs      A comment is simply a piece of text describing the purpose of a block of code or configuration   And because you can specify keys multiple times in JSON  you can do it like this   It s syntactically correct and the only tradeoff is you ll have an empty key with some garbage value in your dictionary  which you could trim      I saw this question years and years ago but I only just saw this done like this in a project I m working on and I thought this was a really clean way to do it   Enjoy

User · Answer

You can have comments in JSONP  but not in pure JSON  I ve just spent an hour trying to make my program work with this example from Highcharts  http   www highcharts com samples data jsonp php filename aapl-c json amp callback    If you follow the link  you will see       AAPL historical OHLC data from the Google Finance API         May 2006     1147651200000 67 79    1147737600000 64 98        1368057600000 456 77    1368144000000 452 97        Since I had a similar file in my local folder  there were no issues with the Same-origin policy  so I decided to use pure JSON    and  of course    getJSON was failing silently because of the comments   Eventually I just sent a manual HTTP request to the address above and realized that the content-type was text javascript since  well  JSONP returns pure JavaScript  In this case comments are allowed  But my application returned content-type application json  so I had to remove the comments

User · Answer

Yes  you can have comments  But I will not recommend whatever reason mentioned above   I did some investigation  and I found all JSON require methods use the JSON parse method  So I came to a solution  We can override or do monkey patching around JSON parse      Note  tested on Node js only  -    var oldParse   JSON parse  JSON parse   parse  function parse json       json   json replace               function comment           console log  comment    comment           return                 return oldParse json      JSON file        test   1      Hello  babe

User · Answer

This entire thread assumes that adding comments is the only improvement that needs to be made to JSON  If someone doesn t want comments in JSON because it s to be used for serialization  just omit the comments  The same goes for whitespace  But why stop there  Why are quotation marks required in JSON  They add nothing useful   The only reason I can think of for JSON to be so rigid is if parsing is difficult  But it isn t  Almost any programmer can write a JSON parser  in either direction   I want JSON to be readable and efficient  brief   and useful for data transmission  configuration files  and lots more  Both of these requirements are satisfied by the following example    stringA  stringB  stringC  stringD   stringE  stringF     Shorter than any existing JSON specification  but just as readable and more efficient   Need to include quotation marks  apostrophes  commas  or brackets in a property or value  Just enclose them in question marks or apostrophes  with backslash escape   just like in JavaScript   But please make quotation marks optional  Why  Because JSON cannot contain variable or function names  to avoid injection attacks   so quotation marks don t provide any disambiguation  We already know that all the data are strings  So  please  leave out the quotation marks already  unless they are really needed

User · Answer

JSON doesn t allow comments  per se  The reasoning is utterly foolish  because you can use JSON itself to create comments  which obviates the reasoning entirely  and loads the parser data space for no good reason at all for exactly the same result and potential issues  such as they are  a JSON file with comments   If you try to put comments in  using    or       or   for instance   then some parsers will fail because this is strictly not within the JSON specification  So you should never do that   Here  for instance  where my image manipulation system has saved image notations and some basic formatted  comment  information relating to them  at the bottom          quot Notations quot                            quot anchorX quot   333               quot anchorY quot   265               quot areaMode quot    quot Ellipse quot                quot extentX quot   356               quot extentY quot   294               quot opacity quot   0 5               quot text quot    quot Elliptical area on top quot                quot textX quot   333               quot textY quot   265               quot title quot    quot Notation 1 quot                                    quot anchorX quot   87               quot anchorY quot   385               quot areaMode quot    quot Rectangle quot                quot extentX quot   109               quot extentY quot   412               quot opacity quot   0 5               quot text quot    quot Rect area non bottom quot                quot textX quot   98               quot textY quot   385               quot title quot    quot Notation 2 quot                                    quot anchorX quot   69               quot anchorY quot   104               quot areaMode quot    quot Polygon quot                quot extentX quot   102               quot extentY quot   136               quot opacity quot   0 5               quot pointList quot                                            quot i quot   0                       quot x quot   83                       quot y quot   104                                                           quot i quot   1                       quot x quot   69                       quot y quot   136                                                           quot i quot   2                       quot x quot   102                       quot y quot   132                                                           quot i quot   3                       quot x quot   83                       quot y quot   104                                               quot text quot    quot Simple polygon quot                quot textX quot   85               quot textY quot   104               quot title quot    quot Notation 3 quot                        quot imageXW quot   512       quot imageYW quot   512       quot imageName quot    quot lena std ato quot        quot tinyDocs quot              quot c01 quot    quot JSON image notation data  quot            quot c02 quot    quot ------------------------- quot            quot c03 quot    quot  quot            quot c04 quot    quot This data contains image notations and related area quot            quot c05 quot    quot selection information that provides a means for an quot            quot c06 quot    quot image gallery to display notations with elliptical  quot            quot c07 quot    quot rectangular  polygonal or freehand area indications quot            quot c08 quot    quot over an image displayed to a gallery visitor  quot            quot c09 quot    quot  quot            quot c10 quot    quot X and Y positions are all in image space  The image quot            quot c11 quot    quot resolution is given as imageXW and imageYW  which quot            quot c12 quot    quot you use to scale the notation areas to their proper quot            quot c13 quot    quot locations and sizes for your display of the image  quot            quot c14 quot    quot regardless of scale  quot            quot c15 quot    quot  quot            quot c16 quot    quot For Ellipses  anchor is the  center of the ellipse  quot            quot c17 quot    quot and the extents are the X and Y radii respectively  quot            quot c18 quot    quot  quot            quot c19 quot    quot For Rectangles  the anchor is the top left and the quot            quot c20 quot    quot extents are the bottom right  quot            quot c21 quot    quot  quot            quot c22 quot    quot For Freehand and Polygon area modes  the pointList quot            quot c23 quot    quot contains a series of numbered XY points  If the area quot            quot c24 quot    quot is closed  the last point will be the same as the quot            quot c25 quot    quot first  so all you have to be concerned with is drawing quot            quot c26 quot    quot lines between the points in the list  Anchor and extent quot            quot c27 quot    quot are set to the top left and bottom right of the indicated quot            quot c28 quot    quot region  and can be used as a simplistic rectangular quot            quot c29 quot    quot detect for the mouse hover position over these types quot            quot c30 quot    quot of areas  quot            quot c31 quot    quot  quot            quot c32 quot    quot The textx and texty positions provide basic positioning quot            quot c33 quot    quot information to help you locate the text information quot            quot c34 quot    quot in a reasonable location associated with the area quot            quot c35 quot    quot indication  quot            quot c36 quot    quot  quot            quot c37 quot    quot Opacity is a value between 0 and 1  where  5 represents quot            quot c38 quot    quot a 50  opaque backdrop and 1 0 represents a fully opaque quot            quot c39 quot    quot backdrop  Recommendation is that regions be drawn quot            quot c40 quot    quot only if the user hovers the pointer over the image  quot            quot c41 quot    quot and that the text associated with the regions be drawn quot            quot c42 quot    quot only if the user hovers the pointer over the indicated quot            quot c43 quot    quot region  quot

User · Answer

We are using strip-json-comments for our project  It supports something like         Description              rainbows      unicorn            cake      Simply npm install --save strip-json-comments to install and use it like   var strip json comments   require  strip-json-comments   var json       rainbows   unicorn   cake     JSON parse strip json comments json        gt   unicorn   cake

User · Answer

In my case  I need to use comments for debug purposes just before the output of the JSON  So I put the debug information in the HTTP header  to avoid breaking the client  header  quot My-Json-Comment  Yes  I know it s a workaround  -   quot

User · Answer

There is a good solution  hack   which is valid JSON  but it will not work in all cases  see comments below   Just make the same key twice  or more   For example       quot param quot     quot This is the comment place quot      quot param quot     quot This is value place quot      So JSON will understand this as       quot param quot     quot This is value place quot

User · Answer

The idea behind JSON is to provide simple data exchange between applications  These are typically web based and the language is JavaScript   It doesn t really allow for comments as such  however  passing a comment as one of the name value pairs in the data would certainly work  although that data would obviously need to be ignored or handled specifically by the parsing code   All that said  it s not the intention that the JSON file should contain comments in the traditional sense  It should just be the data   Have a look at the JSON website for more detail

User · Answer

If you use JSON5 you can include comments     JSON5 is a proposed extension to JSON that aims to make it easier for humans to write and maintain by hand  It does this by adding some minimal syntax features directly from ECMAScript nbsp 5

User · Answer

I really like  eli  s approach  there are over 30 answers but no one has mentioned lists  array   So using  eli  s approach we could do something like   quot part of speech quot        quot   comment quot          quot  param  String  type - the following types can be used   quot          quot NOUN  VERB  ADVERB  ADJECTIVE  PRONOUN  PREPOSITION quot          quot CONJUNCTION  INTERJECTION  NUMERAL  PARTICLE  PHRASE quot        quot  param  String  type free form - is optional  can be empty string quot        quot  param  String  description - is optional  can be empty string quot        quot  param  String  source - is optional  can be empty string quot          quot type quot    quot NOUN quot      quot type free form quot    quot noun quot      quot description quot    quot  quot      quot source quot    quot https   google com quot      quot noun class quot          quot   comment quot            quot  param  String  noun class - the following types can be used   quot            quot 1 class  2 class  3 class  4 class  5 class  6 class quot              quot noun class quot    quot 4 class quot

User · Answer

If you are using the Newtonsoft Json library with ASP NET to read deserialize you can use comments in the JSON content      quot name quot    quot string quot     quot id quot   int  or     This is a comment example     PS  Single-line comments are only supported with 6  versions of Newtonsoft Json  Additional note for people who can t think out of the box  I use the JSON format for basic settings in an ASP NET web application I made  I read the file  convert it into the settings object with the Newtonsoft library and use it when necessary  I prefer writing comments about each individual setting in the JSON file itself  and I really don t care about the integrity of the JSON format as long as the library I use is OK with it  I think this is an  easier to use understand  way than creating a separate  settings README  file and explaining the settings in it  If you have a problem with this kind of usage  sorry  the genie is out of the lamp  People would find other usages for JSON format  and there is nothing you can do about it

User · Answer

If you are using Jackson as your JSON parser then this is how you enable it to allow comments   ObjectMapper mapper   new ObjectMapper   configure Feature ALLOW COMMENTS  true     Then you can have comments like this       key   value     Comment     And you can also have comments starting with   by setting   mapper configure Feature ALLOW YAML COMMENTS  true     But in general  as answered before  the specification does not allow comments

User · Answer

No  The JSON is data only  and if you include a comment  then it will be data too  You could have a designated data element called  quot  comment quot   or something  that should be ignored by apps that use the JSON data  You would probably be better having the comment in the processes that generates receives the JSON  as they are supposed to know what the JSON data will be in advance  or at least the structure of it  But if you decided to        quot  comment quot    quot comment text goes here    quot       quot glossary quot            quot title quot    quot example glossary quot          quot GlossDiv quot               quot title quot    quot S quot             quot GlossList quot                  quot GlossEntry quot                     quot ID quot    quot SGML quot                   quot SortAs quot    quot SGML quot                   quot GlossTerm quot    quot Standard Generalized Markup Language quot                   quot Acronym quot    quot SGML quot                   quot Abbrev quot    quot ISO 8879 1986 quot                   quot GlossDef quot                        quot para quot    quot A meta-markup language  used to create markup languages such as DocBook  quot                      quot GlossSeeAlso quot     quot GML quot    quot XML quot                                     quot GlossSee quot    quot markup quot

User · Answer

Yes   You can put comments in a JSON file              Location to post to        postUrl    https   example com upload              Username for basic auth        username    joebloggs             Password for basic auth  note this is in clear  be sure to use HTTPS         password    bloejoggs      A comment is simply a piece of text describing the purpose of a block of code or configuration   And because you can specify keys multiple times in JSON  you can do it like this   It s syntactically correct and the only tradeoff is you ll have an empty key with some garbage value in your dictionary  which you could trim      I saw this question years and years ago but I only just saw this done like this in a project I m working on and I thought this was a really clean way to do it   Enjoy

User · Answer

I came across this problem in my current project as I have quite a bit of JSON that requires some commenting to keep things easy to remember  I ve used this simple Python function to replace comments  amp  use json loads to convert it into a dict  import json  re  def parse json data string     result        for line in data string split  quot  n quot        line   line strip       if len line   lt  1 or line 0 2      quot    quot         continue     if line -1  not in  quot     quot    quot         line   re sub  quot          quot    quot  quot   line      result append line    return json loads  quot  n quot  join result    print parse json  quot  quot  quot         This is a comment    quot name quot    quot value quot     so is this       quot name quot    quot value quot       the above line gets removed    quot  quot  quot

User · Answer

Include comments if you choose  strip them out with a minifier before parsing or transmitting   I just released JSON minify   which strips out comments and whitespace from a block of JSON and makes it valid JSON that can be parsed  So  you might use it like     JSON parse JSON minify my str      When I released it  I got a huge backlash of people disagreeing with even the idea of it  so I decided that I d write a comprehensive blog post on why comments make sense in JSON  It includes this notable comment from the creator of JSON      Suppose you are using JSON to keep configuration files  which you would like to annotate  Go ahead and insert all the comments you like  Then pipe it through JSMin before handing it to your JSON parser  - Douglas Crockford  2012   Hopefully that s helpful to those who disagree with why JSON minify   could be useful

User · Answer

Consider using YAML  It s nearly a superset of JSON  virtually all valid JSON is valid YAML  and it allows comments

User · Answer

It depends on your JSON library  Json NET supports JavaScript-style comments     commment      See another Stack nbsp Overflow question

User · Answer

The Dojo Toolkit JavaScript toolkit  at least as of version 1 4   allows you to include comments in your JSON  The comments can be of       format  Dojo Toolkit consumes the JSON via the dojo xhrGet   call   Other JavaScript toolkits may work similarly   This can be helpful when experimenting with alternate data structures  or even data lists  before choosing a final option

User · Answer

If you are using PHP  you can use this function to search for and remove       type comments from the JSON string before parsing it into an object array   function json clean decode  json   assoc   true   depth   512   options   0              search and remove comments like       and            json   preg replace               r n               r n              s t                       json           if version compare phpversion     5 4 0     gt                    json   json decode  json   assoc   depth   options                   elseif version compare phpversion     5 3 0     gt                    json   json decode  json   assoc   depth                   else               json   json decode  json   assoc                    return  json         Hope this helps

User · Answer

If you are using PHP  you can use this function to search for and remove       type comments from the JSON string before parsing it into an object array   function json clean decode  json   assoc   true   depth   512   options   0              search and remove comments like       and            json   preg replace               r n               r n              s t                       json           if version compare phpversion     5 4 0     gt                    json   json decode  json   assoc   depth   options                   elseif version compare phpversion     5 3 0     gt                    json   json decode  json   assoc   depth                   else               json   json decode  json   assoc                    return  json         Hope this helps

User · Answer

There are other libraries that are JSON compatible  which support comments   One notable example is the  Hashcorp Language   HCL    It is written by the same people who made Vagrant  packer  consul  and vault

User · Answer

It depends on your JSON library  Json NET supports JavaScript-style comments     commment      See another Stack nbsp Overflow question

User · Answer

You can use JSON with comments in it  if you load it as a text file  and then remove comments   For example  you can use decomment library for that  Below is a complete example   Input JSON  file input js         multi-line comments            value   123    one-line comment     Test Application   var decomment   require  decomment    var fs   require  fs     fs readFile  input js    utf8   function  err  data        if  err            console log err         else           var text   decomment data      removing comments         var json   JSON parse text      parsing JSON         console log json               Output     value  123     See also  gulp-decomment  grunt-decomment

User · Answer

JSON does not support comments  It was also never intended to be used for configuration files where comments would be needed  Hjson is a configuration file format for humans  Relaxed syntax  fewer mistakes  more comments   See hjson github io for JavaScript  Java  Python  PHP  Rust  Go  Ruby  C   and C  libraries

User · Answer

Comments are not an official standard  although some parsers support C  -style comments  One that I use is JsonCpp  In the examples there is this one     Configuration options          Default encoding for text      quot encoding quot     quot UTF-8 quot           Plug-ins loaded at start-up      quot plug-ins quot               quot python quot            quot c   quot            quot ruby quot                     Tab indent size      quot indent quot       quot length quot    3   quot use space quot   true      jsonlint does not validate this  So comments are a parser specific extension and not standard  Another parser is JSON5  An alternative to JSON TOML  A further alternative is jsonc  The latest version of nlohmann json has optional support for ignoring comments on parsing

User · Answer

This entire thread assumes that adding comments is the only improvement that needs to be made to JSON  If someone doesn t want comments in JSON because it s to be used for serialization  just omit the comments  The same goes for whitespace  But why stop there  Why are quotation marks required in JSON  They add nothing useful   The only reason I can think of for JSON to be so rigid is if parsing is difficult  But it isn t  Almost any programmer can write a JSON parser  in either direction   I want JSON to be readable and efficient  brief   and useful for data transmission  configuration files  and lots more  Both of these requirements are satisfied by the following example    stringA  stringB  stringC  stringD   stringE  stringF     Shorter than any existing JSON specification  but just as readable and more efficient   Need to include quotation marks  apostrophes  commas  or brackets in a property or value  Just enclose them in question marks or apostrophes  with backslash escape   just like in JavaScript   But please make quotation marks optional  Why  Because JSON cannot contain variable or function names  to avoid injection attacks   so quotation marks don t provide any disambiguation  We already know that all the data are strings  So  please  leave out the quotation marks already  unless they are really needed

User · Answer

You should write a JSON schema instead  JSON schema is currently a proposed Internet draft specification  Besides documentation  the schema can also be used for validating your JSON data   Example          description   A person        type   object        properties                          name                                          type   string                                  age                                          type   integer                        maximum  125                                 You can provide documentation by using the description schema attribute

User · Answer

If your text file  which is a JSON string  is going to be read by some program  how difficult would it be to strip out either C or C   style comments before using it   Answer  It would be a one liner  If you do that then JSON files could be used as configuration files

User · Answer

json files are generally used as configuration files or static data  thus the need of comments    some editors like NetBeans accept comments in   json  The problem is parsing content to an object  The solution is to always apply a cleaning function  server or client      PHP   rgx arr     quot         n   sim quot    quot              sim quot    quot    n r t  sim quot      valid json str    preg replace  rgx arr      file get contents path    a file json         JavaScript valid json str   json str replace         n   gim     replace              gim

User · Answer

This is a  can you  question  And here is a  yes  answer   No  you shouldn t use duplicative object members to stuff side channel data into a JSON encoding   See  The names within an object SHOULD be unique  in the RFC    And yes  you could insert comments around the JSON  which you could parse out   But if you want a way of inserting and extracting arbitrary side-channel data to a valid JSON  here is an answer  We take advantage of the non-unique representation of data in a JSON encoding  This is allowed  in section two of the RFC under  whitespace is allowed before or after any of the six structural characters     The RFC only states  whitespace is allowed before or after any of the six structural characters   not explicitly mentioning strings  numbers   false    true   and  null   This omission is ignored in ALL implementations     First  canonicalize your JSON by minifying it    jsonMin   json encode json decode  json      Then encode your comment in binary    hex   unpack  H     comment    commentBinary   base convert  hex 1   16  2     Then steg your binary    steg   str replace  0         commentBinary    steg   str replace  1     t    steg     Here is your output    jsonWithComment    steg    jsonMin

User · Answer

There is a good solution  hack   which is valid JSON  but it will not work in all cases  see comments below   Just make the same key twice  or more   For example       quot param quot     quot This is the comment place quot      quot param quot     quot This is value place quot      So JSON will understand this as       quot param quot     quot This is value place quot

User · Answer

JSON doesn t allow comments  per se  The reasoning is utterly foolish  because you can use JSON itself to create comments  which obviates the reasoning entirely  and loads the parser data space for no good reason at all for exactly the same result and potential issues  such as they are  a JSON file with comments   If you try to put comments in  using    or       or   for instance   then some parsers will fail because this is strictly not within the JSON specification  So you should never do that   Here  for instance  where my image manipulation system has saved image notations and some basic formatted  comment  information relating to them  at the bottom          quot Notations quot                            quot anchorX quot   333               quot anchorY quot   265               quot areaMode quot    quot Ellipse quot                quot extentX quot   356               quot extentY quot   294               quot opacity quot   0 5               quot text quot    quot Elliptical area on top quot                quot textX quot   333               quot textY quot   265               quot title quot    quot Notation 1 quot                                    quot anchorX quot   87               quot anchorY quot   385               quot areaMode quot    quot Rectangle quot                quot extentX quot   109               quot extentY quot   412               quot opacity quot   0 5               quot text quot    quot Rect area non bottom quot                quot textX quot   98               quot textY quot   385               quot title quot    quot Notation 2 quot                                    quot anchorX quot   69               quot anchorY quot   104               quot areaMode quot    quot Polygon quot                quot extentX quot   102               quot extentY quot   136               quot opacity quot   0 5               quot pointList quot                                            quot i quot   0                       quot x quot   83                       quot y quot   104                                                           quot i quot   1                       quot x quot   69                       quot y quot   136                                                           quot i quot   2                       quot x quot   102                       quot y quot   132                                                           quot i quot   3                       quot x quot   83                       quot y quot   104                                               quot text quot    quot Simple polygon quot                quot textX quot   85               quot textY quot   104               quot title quot    quot Notation 3 quot                        quot imageXW quot   512       quot imageYW quot   512       quot imageName quot    quot lena std ato quot        quot tinyDocs quot              quot c01 quot    quot JSON image notation data  quot            quot c02 quot    quot ------------------------- quot            quot c03 quot    quot  quot            quot c04 quot    quot This data contains image notations and related area quot            quot c05 quot    quot selection information that provides a means for an quot            quot c06 quot    quot image gallery to display notations with elliptical  quot            quot c07 quot    quot rectangular  polygonal or freehand area indications quot            quot c08 quot    quot over an image displayed to a gallery visitor  quot            quot c09 quot    quot  quot            quot c10 quot    quot X and Y positions are all in image space  The image quot            quot c11 quot    quot resolution is given as imageXW and imageYW  which quot            quot c12 quot    quot you use to scale the notation areas to their proper quot            quot c13 quot    quot locations and sizes for your display of the image  quot            quot c14 quot    quot regardless of scale  quot            quot c15 quot    quot  quot            quot c16 quot    quot For Ellipses  anchor is the  center of the ellipse  quot            quot c17 quot    quot and the extents are the X and Y radii respectively  quot            quot c18 quot    quot  quot            quot c19 quot    quot For Rectangles  the anchor is the top left and the quot            quot c20 quot    quot extents are the bottom right  quot            quot c21 quot    quot  quot            quot c22 quot    quot For Freehand and Polygon area modes  the pointList quot            quot c23 quot    quot contains a series of numbered XY points  If the area quot            quot c24 quot    quot is closed  the last point will be the same as the quot            quot c25 quot    quot first  so all you have to be concerned with is drawing quot            quot c26 quot    quot lines between the points in the list  Anchor and extent quot            quot c27 quot    quot are set to the top left and bottom right of the indicated quot            quot c28 quot    quot region  and can be used as a simplistic rectangular quot            quot c29 quot    quot detect for the mouse hover position over these types quot            quot c30 quot    quot of areas  quot            quot c31 quot    quot  quot            quot c32 quot    quot The textx and texty positions provide basic positioning quot            quot c33 quot    quot information to help you locate the text information quot            quot c34 quot    quot in a reasonable location associated with the area quot            quot c35 quot    quot indication  quot            quot c36 quot    quot  quot            quot c37 quot    quot Opacity is a value between 0 and 1  where  5 represents quot            quot c38 quot    quot a 50  opaque backdrop and 1 0 represents a fully opaque quot            quot c39 quot    quot backdrop  Recommendation is that regions be drawn quot            quot c40 quot    quot only if the user hovers the pointer over the image  quot            quot c41 quot    quot and that the text associated with the regions be drawn quot            quot c42 quot    quot only if the user hovers the pointer over the indicated quot            quot c43 quot    quot region  quot

User · Answer

You can use JSON-LD and the schema org comment type to properly write comments           https   schema org comment    this is a comment

User · Answer

json files are generally used as configuration files or static data  thus the need of comments    some editors like NetBeans accept comments in   json  The problem is parsing content to an object  The solution is to always apply a cleaning function  server or client      PHP   rgx arr     quot         n   sim quot    quot              sim quot    quot    n r t  sim quot      valid json str    preg replace  rgx arr      file get contents path    a file json         JavaScript valid json str   json str replace         n   gim     replace              gim

User · Answer

Yes  the new standard  JSON5 allows the C   style comments  among many other extensions     A single line comment      A multi-    line comment      The JSON5 Data Interchange Format  JSON5  is a superset of JSON that aims to alleviate some of the limitations of JSON  It is fully backwards compatible  and using it is probably better than writing the custom non standard parser  turning non standard features on for the existing one or using various hacks like string fields for commenting  Or  if the parser in use supports  simply agree we are using JSON 5 subset that is JSON and C   style comments  It is much better than we tweak JSON standard the way we see fit  There is already npm package  Python package  Java package and C library available  It is backwards compatible  I see no reason to stay with the  quot official quot  JSON restrictions  I think that removing comments from JSON has been driven by the same reasons as removing the operator overloading in Java  can be used the wrong way yet some clearly legitimate use cases were overlooked  For operator overloading  it is matrix algebra and complex numbers  For JSON comments  its is configuration files and other documents that may be written  edited or read by humans and not just by parser

User · Answer

The practical answer for Visual Studio Code users in 2019 is to use the  jsonc  extension  It is practical  because that is the extension recognized by Visual Studio Code to indicate  quot JSON with comments quot   Please let me know about other editors IDEs in the comments below  It would be nice if Visual Studio Code and other editors would add native support for JSON5 as well  but for now Visual Studio Code only includes support for  jsonc    I searched through all the answers before posting this and none mention  jsonc

User · Answer

Comments were removed from JSON by design   I removed comments from JSON because I saw people were using them to hold parsing directives  a practice which would have destroyed interoperability  I know that the lack of comments makes some people sad  but it shouldn t  Suppose you are using JSON to keep configuration files  which you would like to annotate  Go ahead and insert all the comments you like  Then pipe it through JSMin before handing it to your JSON parser   Source  Public statement by Douglas Crockford on G

User · Answer

If you use JSON5 you can include comments     JSON5 is a proposed extension to JSON that aims to make it easier for humans to write and maintain by hand  It does this by adding some minimal syntax features directly from ECMAScript nbsp 5

User · Answer

JSON makes a lot of sense for config files and other local usage because it s ubiquitous and because it s much simpler than XML    If people have strong reasons against having comments in JSON when communicating data  whether valid or not   then possibly JSON could be split into two    JSON-COM  JSON on the wire  or rules that apply when communicating JSON data  JSON-DOC  JSON document  or JSON in files or locally  Rules that define a valid JSON document    JSON-DOC will allow comments  and other minor differences might exist such as handling whitespace  Parsers can easily convert from one spec to the other    With regards to the remark made by Douglas Crockford on this issues  referenced by  Artur Czajka      Suppose you are using JSON to keep configuration files  which you would like to annotate  Go ahead and insert all the comments you like  Then pipe it through JSMin before handing it to your JSON parser    We re talking about a generic config file issue  cross language platform   and he s answering with a JS specific utility   Sure a JSON specific minify can be implemented in any language  but standardize this so it becomes ubiquitous across parsers in all languages and platforms so people stop wasting their time lacking the feature because they have good use-cases for it  looking the issue up in online forums  and getting people telling them it s a bad idea or suggesting it s easy to implement stripping comments out of text files   The other issue is interoperability  Suppose you have a library or API or any kind of subsystem which has some config or data files associated with it  And this subsystem is to be accessed from different languages   Then do you go about telling people  by the way don t forget to strip out the comments from the JSON files before passing them to the parser

User · Answer

You can use JSON with comments in it  if you load it as a text file  and then remove comments   For example  you can use decomment library for that  Below is a complete example   Input JSON  file input js         multi-line comments            value   123    one-line comment     Test Application   var decomment   require  decomment    var fs   require  fs     fs readFile  input js    utf8   function  err  data        if  err            console log err         else           var text   decomment data      removing comments         var json   JSON parse text      parsing JSON         console log json               Output     value  123     See also  gulp-decomment  grunt-decomment

User · Answer

Sigh  Why not just add fields  e g          note1     This demonstrates the provision of annotations within a JSON file        field1    12       field2     some text         note2     Add more annotations as necessary      Just make sure your  notex  names don t conflict with any real fields

User · Answer

If you are using Jackson as your JSON parser then this is how you enable it to allow comments   ObjectMapper mapper   new ObjectMapper   configure Feature ALLOW COMMENTS  true     Then you can have comments like this       key   value     Comment     And you can also have comments starting with   by setting   mapper configure Feature ALLOW YAML COMMENTS  true     But in general  as answered before  the specification does not allow comments

User · Answer

Yes  you can  but your parse will probably fail  there is no standard    To parse it you should remove those comments  or by hand  or using a regular expression   It replaces any comments  like            Hey                   r n               r n              It replaces any comments  like      Hey             In JavaScript  you could do something like this   jsonString   jsonString replace              r n               r n                 replace              var object   JSON parse jsonString

User · Answer

To cut a JSON item into parts I add  dummy comment  lines                                         Part1     data1                 value1    data2                 value2                                       Part2     data4                 value3    data3                 value4

User · Answer

JSON is not a framed protocol  It is a language free format  So a comment s format is not defined for JSON   As many people have suggested  there are some tricks  for example  duplicate keys or a specific key  comment that you can use  It s up to you

User · Answer

You can t  At least that s my experience from a quick glance at json org   JSON has its syntax visualized on that page  There isn t any note about comments

User · Answer

Yes  you can  but your parse will probably fail  there is no standard    To parse it you should remove those comments  or by hand  or using a regular expression   It replaces any comments  like            Hey                   r n               r n              It replaces any comments  like      Hey             In JavaScript  you could do something like this   jsonString   jsonString replace              r n               r n                 replace              var object   JSON parse jsonString

User · Answer

You can t  At least that s my experience from a quick glance at json org   JSON has its syntax visualized on that page  There isn t any note about comments

User · Answer

No  JSON cannot have comments directly  However  as suggested by this  you can achieve a similar effect by doing something like        quot   name quot    quot Name comment here quot        quot name quot    quot Jack quot         quot   age quot    quot Age comment here quot        quot age quot    quot 25 quot     Most JSON parsers will ignore properties that are not mapped

User · Answer

The JSON specification does not support comments     or       style  But some JSON parsing libraries and IDEs support them  Like   JSON5 Visual Studio Code Commentjson

User · Answer

You can use simple preprocessing via regular expressions  For instance  the following function will decode commented JSON in PHP   function json decode commented   data   objectsAsArrays   false   maxDepth   512   opts   0       data   preg replace                                                        v            v                     xs     1    data      return json decode  data   objectsAsArrays   maxDepth   opts       It supports all PHP-style comments             String literals are preserved as is

User · Answer

You can use simple preprocessing via regular expressions  For instance  the following function will decode commented JSON in PHP   function json decode commented   data   objectsAsArrays   false   maxDepth   512   opts   0       data   preg replace                                                        v            v                     xs     1    data      return json decode  data   objectsAsArrays   maxDepth   opts       It supports all PHP-style comments             String literals are preserved as is

User · Answer

No  The JSON is data only  and if you include a comment  then it will be data too  You could have a designated data element called  quot  comment quot   or something  that should be ignored by apps that use the JSON data  You would probably be better having the comment in the processes that generates receives the JSON  as they are supposed to know what the JSON data will be in advance  or at least the structure of it  But if you decided to        quot  comment quot    quot comment text goes here    quot       quot glossary quot            quot title quot    quot example glossary quot          quot GlossDiv quot               quot title quot    quot S quot             quot GlossList quot                  quot GlossEntry quot                     quot ID quot    quot SGML quot                   quot SortAs quot    quot SGML quot                   quot GlossTerm quot    quot Standard Generalized Markup Language quot                   quot Acronym quot    quot SGML quot                   quot Abbrev quot    quot ISO 8879 1986 quot                   quot GlossDef quot                        quot para quot    quot A meta-markup language  used to create markup languages such as DocBook  quot                      quot GlossSeeAlso quot     quot GML quot    quot XML quot                                     quot GlossSee quot    quot markup quot

User · Answer

The author of JSON wants us to include comments in the JSON  but strip them out before parsing them  see link provided by Michael Burr   If JSON should have comments  why not standardize them  and let the JSON parser do the job  I don t agree with the logic there  but  alas  that s the standard  Using a YAML solution as suggested by others is good  but it requires a library dependency   If you want to strip out comments  but don t want to have a library dependency  here is a two-line solution  which works for C  -style comments  but can be adapted to others   var comments   new RegExp          mg    data   JSON parse fs readFileSync sample file   utf8   replace comments          Note that this solution can only be used in cases where you can be sure that the JSON data does not contain the comment initiator  e g           Another way to achieve JSON parsing  stripping of comments  and no extra library  is to evaluate the JSON in a JavaScript interpreter  The caveat with that approach  of course  is that you would only want to evaluate untainted data  no untrusted user-input   Here is an example of this approach in Node js -- another caveat  the following example will only read the data once and then it will be cached   data   require fs realpathSync doctree fp

User · Answer

No  JSON cannot have comments directly  However  as suggested by this  you can achieve a similar effect by doing something like        quot   name quot    quot Name comment here quot        quot name quot    quot Jack quot         quot   age quot    quot Age comment here quot        quot age quot    quot 25 quot     Most JSON parsers will ignore properties that are not mapped

User · Answer

JSON does not support comments  It was also never intended to be used for configuration files where comments would be needed  Hjson is a configuration file format for humans  Relaxed syntax  fewer mistakes  more comments   See hjson github io for JavaScript  Java  Python  PHP  Rust  Go  Ruby  C   and C  libraries

User · Answer

You can use JSON-LD and the schema org comment type to properly write comments           https   schema org comment    this is a comment

User · Answer

As many answers have already pointed out  JSON does not natively have comments  Of course sometimes you want them anyway  For Python  two ways to do that are with commentjson    and    for Python nbsp 2 only  or json tricks    or    for Python nbsp 2 and Python nbsp 3   which has several other features  Disclaimer  I made json tricks

User · Answer

NO  JSON used to support comments  but they were abused and removed from the standard   From the creator of JSON      I removed comments from JSON because I saw people were using them to hold parsing directives  a practice which would have destroyed interoperability   I know that the lack of comments makes some people sad  but it shouldn t   - Douglas Crockford  2012   The official JSON site is at JSON org  JSON is defined as a standard by ECMA International  There is always a petition process to have standards revised  It is unlikely that annotations will be added to the JSON standard for several reasons   JSON by design is an easily reverse-engineered  human parsed  alternative to XML  It is simplified even to the point that annotations are unnecessary  It is not even a markup language  The goal is stability and  interoperablilty   Anyone who understands the  has-a  relationship of object orientation can understand any JSON structure - that is the whole point  It is just a  directed acyclic graph  DAG  with node tags  key value pairs   which is a near universal data structure   This only annotation required might be    These are DAG tags   The key names can be as informative as required  allowing arbitrary semantic arity   Any platform can parse JSON with just a few lines of code  XML requires complex OO libraries that are not viable on many platforms   Annotations would just make JSON make less interoperable  There is simply nothing else to add  unless what you really need is a markup language  XML   and don t care if your persisted data is easily parsed   BUT as the creator of JSON also observed  there has always been JS pipeline support for comments      Go ahead and insert all the comments you like    Then pipe it through JSMin before handing it to your JSON parser  - Douglas Crockford  2012

User · Answer

The idea behind JSON is to provide simple data exchange between applications  These are typically web based and the language is JavaScript   It doesn t really allow for comments as such  however  passing a comment as one of the name value pairs in the data would certainly work  although that data would obviously need to be ignored or handled specifically by the parsing code   All that said  it s not the intention that the JSON file should contain comments in the traditional sense  It should just be the data   Have a look at the JSON website for more detail

User · Answer

As many answers have already pointed out  JSON does not natively have comments  Of course sometimes you want them anyway  For Python  two ways to do that are with commentjson    and    for Python nbsp 2 only  or json tricks    or    for Python nbsp 2 and Python nbsp 3   which has several other features  Disclaimer  I made json tricks

User · Answer

JSON does not support comments natively  but you can make your own decoder or at least preprocessor to strip out comments  that s perfectly fine  as long as you just ignore comments and don t use them to guide how your application should process the JSON data       JSON does not have comments  A JSON encoder MUST NOT output comments    A JSON decoder MAY accept and ignore comments       Comments should never be used to transmit anything meaningful  That is   what JSON is for    Cf  Douglas Crockford  author of JSON spec

User · Answer

The practical answer for Visual Studio Code users in 2019 is to use the  jsonc  extension  It is practical  because that is the extension recognized by Visual Studio Code to indicate  quot JSON with comments quot   Please let me know about other editors IDEs in the comments below  It would be nice if Visual Studio Code and other editors would add native support for JSON5 as well  but for now Visual Studio Code only includes support for  jsonc    I searched through all the answers before posting this and none mention  jsonc

User · Answer

NO  JSON used to support comments  but they were abused and removed from the standard   From the creator of JSON      I removed comments from JSON because I saw people were using them to hold parsing directives  a practice which would have destroyed interoperability   I know that the lack of comments makes some people sad  but it shouldn t   - Douglas Crockford  2012   The official JSON site is at JSON org  JSON is defined as a standard by ECMA International  There is always a petition process to have standards revised  It is unlikely that annotations will be added to the JSON standard for several reasons   JSON by design is an easily reverse-engineered  human parsed  alternative to XML  It is simplified even to the point that annotations are unnecessary  It is not even a markup language  The goal is stability and  interoperablilty   Anyone who understands the  has-a  relationship of object orientation can understand any JSON structure - that is the whole point  It is just a  directed acyclic graph  DAG  with node tags  key value pairs   which is a near universal data structure   This only annotation required might be    These are DAG tags   The key names can be as informative as required  allowing arbitrary semantic arity   Any platform can parse JSON with just a few lines of code  XML requires complex OO libraries that are not viable on many platforms   Annotations would just make JSON make less interoperable  There is simply nothing else to add  unless what you really need is a markup language  XML   and don t care if your persisted data is easily parsed   BUT as the creator of JSON also observed  there has always been JS pipeline support for comments      Go ahead and insert all the comments you like    Then pipe it through JSMin before handing it to your JSON parser  - Douglas Crockford  2012

User · Answer

Consider using YAML  It s nearly a superset of JSON  virtually all valid JSON is valid YAML  and it allows comments

User · Answer

Not technically  But you can workaround as follows        json    actual data goes here  comments below      comment1    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet      comment2    consectetur adipiscing elit      Just put the comments in the data  If you number them to make each key path unique  you should have no problems

User · Answer

To cut a JSON item into parts I add  dummy comment  lines                                         Part1     data1                 value1    data2                 value2                                       Part2     data4                 value3    data3                 value4

User · Answer

No  The JSON is data only  and if you include a comment  then it will be data too  You could have a designated data element called  quot  comment quot   or something  that should be ignored by apps that use the JSON data  You would probably be better having the comment in the processes that generates receives the JSON  as they are supposed to know what the JSON data will be in advance  or at least the structure of it  But if you decided to        quot  comment quot    quot comment text goes here    quot       quot glossary quot            quot title quot    quot example glossary quot          quot GlossDiv quot               quot title quot    quot S quot             quot GlossList quot                  quot GlossEntry quot                     quot ID quot    quot SGML quot                   quot SortAs quot    quot SGML quot                   quot GlossTerm quot    quot Standard Generalized Markup Language quot                   quot Acronym quot    quot SGML quot                   quot Abbrev quot    quot ISO 8879 1986 quot                   quot GlossDef quot                        quot para quot    quot A meta-markup language  used to create markup languages such as DocBook  quot                      quot GlossSeeAlso quot     quot GML quot    quot XML quot                                     quot GlossSee quot    quot markup quot

User · Answer

If your context is Node js configuration  you might consider JavaScript via module exports as an alternative to JSON   module exports          key    value           And with comments       key2    value2       The require syntax will still be the same  Being JavaScript  the file extension should be  js

User · Answer

No  comments of the form       or         are not allowed in JSON  This answer is based on   https   www json org RFC 4627  The application json Media Type for JavaScript Object Notation  JSON  RFC 8259 The JavaScript Object Notation  JSON  Data Interchange Format  supercedes RFCs 4627  7158  7159

User · Answer

Include comments if you choose  strip them out with a minifier before parsing or transmitting   I just released JSON minify   which strips out comments and whitespace from a block of JSON and makes it valid JSON that can be parsed  So  you might use it like     JSON parse JSON minify my str      When I released it  I got a huge backlash of people disagreeing with even the idea of it  so I decided that I d write a comprehensive blog post on why comments make sense in JSON  It includes this notable comment from the creator of JSON      Suppose you are using JSON to keep configuration files  which you would like to annotate  Go ahead and insert all the comments you like  Then pipe it through JSMin before handing it to your JSON parser  - Douglas Crockford  2012   Hopefully that s helpful to those who disagree with why JSON minify   could be useful

User · Answer

The idea behind JSON is to provide simple data exchange between applications  These are typically web based and the language is JavaScript   It doesn t really allow for comments as such  however  passing a comment as one of the name value pairs in the data would certainly work  although that data would obviously need to be ignored or handled specifically by the parsing code   All that said  it s not the intention that the JSON file should contain comments in the traditional sense  It should just be the data   Have a look at the JSON website for more detail

User · Answer

In my case  I need to use comments for debug purposes just before the output of the JSON  So I put the debug information in the HTTP header  to avoid breaking the client  header  quot My-Json-Comment  Yes  I know it s a workaround  -   quot

User · Answer

Yes  you can have comments  But I will not recommend whatever reason mentioned above   I did some investigation  and I found all JSON require methods use the JSON parse method  So I came to a solution  We can override or do monkey patching around JSON parse      Note  tested on Node js only  -    var oldParse   JSON parse  JSON parse   parse  function parse json       json   json replace               function comment           console log  comment    comment           return                 return oldParse json      JSON file        test   1      Hello  babe

User · Answer

I just encountering this for configuration files  I don t want to use XML  verbose  graphically  ugly  hard to read   or  ini  format  no hierarchy  no real standard  etc   or Java  Properties  format  like  ini    JSON can do all they can do  but it is way less verbose and more human readable - and parsers are easy and ubiquitous in many languages  It s just a tree of data  But out-of-band comments are a necessity often to document  default  configurations and the like  Configurations are never to be  full documents   but trees of saved data that can be human readable when needed   I guess one could use       comment   for  valid  JSON

User · Answer

I came across this problem in my current project as I have quite a bit of JSON that requires some commenting to keep things easy to remember  I ve used this simple Python function to replace comments  amp  use json loads to convert it into a dict  import json  re  def parse json data string     result        for line in data string split  quot  n quot        line   line strip       if len line   lt  1 or line 0 2      quot    quot         continue     if line -1  not in  quot     quot    quot         line   re sub  quot          quot    quot  quot   line      result append line    return json loads  quot  n quot  join result    print parse json  quot  quot  quot         This is a comment    quot name quot    quot value quot     so is this       quot name quot    quot value quot       the above line gets removed    quot  quot  quot

User · Answer

Disclaimer  This is silly There is actually a way to add comments  and stay within the specification  no additional parser needed   It will not result into human-readable comments without any sort of parsing though  You could abuse the following   Insignificant whitespace is allowed before or after any token  Whitespace is any sequence of one or more of the following code points  character tabulation  U 0009   line feed  U 000A   carriage return  U 000D   and space  U 0020    In a hacky way  you can abuse this to add a comment  For instance  start and end your comment with a tab  Encode the comment in base3 and use the other whitespace characters to represent them  For instance  010212 010202 011000 011000 011010 001012 010122 010121 011021 010202 001012 011022 010212 011020 010202 010202   hello base three in ASCII  But instead of 0 use space  for 1 use line feed and for 2 use carriage return  This will just leave you with a lot of unreadable whitespace  unless you make an IDE plugin to encode decode it on the fly   I never even tried this  for obvious reasons and neither should you

User · Answer

Sure you can comment JSON  To read a commented JSON file from JavaScript you can strip comments before parsing it  see the code below    I m sure this code can be improved  but it is easy to understand for those who use regular expressions  I use commented JSON files to specify neuron shapes for my synthetic reflex systems   I also use commented JSON to store intermediate states for a running neuron system   It is very convenient to have comments   Don t listen to didacts who tell you they are a bad idea  fetch filename  then function response        return response text       then function commented        return commented          replace        s S                          gm    1            replace   r   quot  n quot            replace   n  n     quot  n quot       then function clean        return JSON parse clean      then function json           Do what you want with the JSON object

User · Answer

If your text file  which is a JSON string  is going to be read by some program  how difficult would it be to strip out either C or C   style comments before using it   Answer  It would be a one liner  If you do that then JSON files could be used as configuration files

User · Answer

DISCLAIMER  YOUR WARRANTY IS VOID  As has been pointed out  this hack takes advantage of the implementation of the spec  Not all JSON parsers will understand this sort of JSON  Streaming parsers in particular will choke   It s an interesting curiosity  but you should really not be using it for anything at all  Below is the original answer     I ve found a little hack that allows you to place comments in a JSON file that will not affect the parsing  or alter the data being represented in any way   It appears that when declaring an object literal you can specify two values with the same key  and the last one takes precedence  Believe it or not  it turns out that JSON parsers work the same way  So we can use this to create comments in the source JSON that will not be present in a parsed object representation      a  1  a  2         gt  Object  a  2  Object keys JSON parse    a   1   a   2     length        gt  1   If we apply this technique  your commented JSON file might look like this        api host     The hostname of your API server  You may also specify the port       api host     hodorhodor com       retry interval     The interval in seconds between retrying failed API calls      retry interval    10      auth token     The authentication token  It is available in your developer dashboard under  Settings       auth token     5ad0eb93697215bc0d48a7b69aa6fb8b       favorite numbers    An array containing my all-time favorite numbers      favorite numbers    19  13  53      The above code is valid JSON  If you parse it  you ll get an object like this          api host    hodorhodor com        retry interval   10       auth token    5ad0eb93697215bc0d48a7b69aa6fb8b        favorite numbers    19 13 53      Which means there is no trace of the comments  and they won t have weird side-effects   Happy hacking

User · Answer

Comments are not an official standard  although some parsers support C  -style comments  One that I use is JsonCpp  In the examples there is this one     Configuration options          Default encoding for text      quot encoding quot     quot UTF-8 quot           Plug-ins loaded at start-up      quot plug-ins quot               quot python quot            quot c   quot            quot ruby quot                     Tab indent size      quot indent quot       quot length quot    3   quot use space quot   true      jsonlint does not validate this  So comments are a parser specific extension and not standard  Another parser is JSON5  An alternative to JSON TOML  A further alternative is jsonc  The latest version of nlohmann json has optional support for ignoring comments on parsing

User · Answer

I really like  eli  s approach  there are over 30 answers but no one has mentioned lists  array   So using  eli  s approach we could do something like   quot part of speech quot        quot   comment quot          quot  param  String  type - the following types can be used   quot          quot NOUN  VERB  ADVERB  ADJECTIVE  PRONOUN  PREPOSITION quot          quot CONJUNCTION  INTERJECTION  NUMERAL  PARTICLE  PHRASE quot        quot  param  String  type free form - is optional  can be empty string quot        quot  param  String  description - is optional  can be empty string quot        quot  param  String  source - is optional  can be empty string quot          quot type quot    quot NOUN quot      quot type free form quot    quot noun quot      quot description quot    quot  quot      quot source quot    quot https   google com quot      quot noun class quot          quot   comment quot            quot  param  String  noun class - the following types can be used   quot            quot 1 class  2 class  3 class  4 class  5 class  6 class quot              quot noun class quot    quot 4 class quot

User · Answer

There are other libraries that are JSON compatible  which support comments   One notable example is the  Hashcorp Language   HCL    It is written by the same people who made Vagrant  packer  consul  and vault

[json] Can comments be used in JSON?

Examples related to json

Examples related to comments