JSON – JavaScript Object Notation

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation), a lightweight data-interchange format. It’s relatively easy to read for us humans, which is nice, and is a subset of the JavaScript Programming Language Standard (ECMA-262 3rd Edition – December 1999).

JSON is a text format, and even though it’s a subset of JavaScript, is language independent. The conventions are of the C-family of languages like C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, and others.

There are two structures to JSON; a collection of name value pairs and ordered lists of values. For more details check out the organization. A few examples for reference.

A simple JSON object.

{
    "name":"John", 
    "age":30, 
    "car":null
}

An array of JSON objects.

[
    {
        color: "red",
        value: "#f00"
    },
    {
        color: "green",
        value: "#0f0"
    },
    {
        color: "blue",
        value: "#00f"
    },
    {
        color: "cyan",
        value: "#0ff"
    },
    {
        color: "magenta",
        value: "#f0f"
    },
    {
        color: "yellow",
        value: "#ff0"
    },
    {
        color: "black",
        value: "#000"
    }
]

A JSON object using a list.

{  
    "name":"John",  
    "age":30,  
    "cars":["Ford", "BMW", "Fiat"]  
}