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0 pointspacketlost1y ago0 comments

Eh, it really isn't. The format does not lend itself to tabular data, instead the most natural way of representing data involves duplicating the keys N times for each record.

0 comments

koolba1y ago

You can easily represent it as an array:

    [“foo”,”bar”,123]

That’s as tabular as CSV but you now have optional types. You can even have lists of lists. Lists of objects. Lists of lists of objects…

simonw1y ago

Right - the JSON-newline equivalent of CSV can look like this:

    ["id", "species", "nickname"]
    [1, "Chicken", "Chunky cheesecakes"]
    [2, "Dog", "Wagging wonders"]
    [3, "Bunny", "Hopping heroes"]
    [4, "Bat", "Soaring shadows"]

nomel1y ago

Remove the [] characters and you've invented CSV with excel style quoting.

1 more reply

collinmanderson1y ago

This is the way. jsonl where each row is a json list. It has well-defined standard quoting.

Just like csv you don't actually need the header row either, as long as there's convention about field ordering. Similar to proto bufs, where the field names are not included in the file itself.

freehorse1y ago

This misses the point of standardization imo because it’s not possible to know a priori that the first line represents the variable names, that all the rows are supposed to have the same number of elements and in general that this is supposed to represent a table. An arbitrary parser or person wouldn’t know to guess since it's not standard or expected. Of course it would be parsed fine but the default result would be a kind of structure or multi-array rather than tabular.

1 more reply

lgas1y ago

Typing isn't optional in JSON, every value has a concrete type, always.

lelandbatey1y ago

Types at the type layer are not the same as types at the semantic layer. Sure every type in the JSON level has a "strong type" but the semantic meaning of the contents of e.g. a string are usually not expressable in pure JSON. So it is with CSV; you can think of every cell in CSV as containing a string (series of bytes) with it being up to you to enforce the semantics atop those bytes. JSON gives you a couple extra types, and if you can fit things into those types well, then that's great, but for most data concrete semantically meaningful data you won't be able to do that and you'll end up in a similar world to CSVs.

gghffguhvc1y ago

  [
   [“header1”,”header2”],
   [“1.1”, “”],
   [7.4, “2022-01-04”]
  ]

1 more reply

packetlostOP1y ago

You're missing my point: basically nothing spits out data in that format because it's not ergonomic to do so. JSON is designed to represent object hierarchies, not tabular data.

hajile1y ago

CSV is lists of lists of fixed length.

JSON is lists of lists of any length and groups of key/value pairs (basically lisp S-expressions with lots of unnecessary syntax). This makes it a superset of CSV's capabilities.

JSON fundamentally IS made to represent tabular data, but it's made to represent key-value groups too.

Why make it able to represent tabular data if that's not an intended use?

4 more replies

kazinator1y ago

A format consisting of newline-terminated records, each containing comma-separated JSON strings would be superior to CSV.

It could use backslash escapes to denote control characters and Unicode points.

Everyone would agree exactly on what the format is, in contrast to the zoo of CSV variants.

It wouldn't have pitfalls in it, like spaces that defeat quotes

  RFC CSV         JSON strings
  a,"b c"         "a", "b c"
  a, "b c"        "a", " \" b c\""

oops; add an innocuous-looking space, and the quotes are now literal.

1 more reply

koolba1y ago

JSON was designed to represent any data. There's plenty of systems that spit out data in exact that format because it's the natural way to represent tabular data using JSON serialization. And clearly if you're the one building the system you can choose to use it.

kccqzy1y ago

JSON is designed to represent JavaScript objects with literal notation. Guess what, an array of strings or an array of numbers or even an array of mixed strings and numbers is a commonly encountered format in JavaScript.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 comments

koolba1y ago

You can easily represent it as an array:

    [“foo”,”bar”,123]

That’s as tabular as CSV but you now have optional types. You can even have lists of lists. Lists of objects. Lists of lists of objects…

simonw1y ago

Right - the JSON-newline equivalent of CSV can look like this:

    ["id", "species", "nickname"]
    [1, "Chicken", "Chunky cheesecakes"]
    [2, "Dog", "Wagging wonders"]
    [3, "Bunny", "Hopping heroes"]
    [4, "Bat", "Soaring shadows"]

nomel1y ago

Remove the [] characters and you've invented CSV with excel style quoting.

1 more reply

collinmanderson1y ago

This is the way. jsonl where each row is a json list. It has well-defined standard quoting.

Just like csv you don't actually need the header row either, as long as there's convention about field ordering. Similar to proto bufs, where the field names are not included in the file itself.

freehorse1y ago

1 more reply

lgas1y ago

Typing isn't optional in JSON, every value has a concrete type, always.

lelandbatey1y ago

gghffguhvc1y ago

  [
   [“header1”,”header2”],
   [“1.1”, “”],
   [7.4, “2022-01-04”]
  ]

1 more reply

packetlostOP1y ago

You're missing my point: basically nothing spits out data in that format because it's not ergonomic to do so. JSON is designed to represent object hierarchies, not tabular data.

hajile1y ago

CSV is lists of lists of fixed length.

JSON is lists of lists of any length and groups of key/value pairs (basically lisp S-expressions with lots of unnecessary syntax). This makes it a superset of CSV's capabilities.

JSON fundamentally IS made to represent tabular data, but it's made to represent key-value groups too.

Why make it able to represent tabular data if that's not an intended use?

4 more replies

kazinator1y ago

A format consisting of newline-terminated records, each containing comma-separated JSON strings would be superior to CSV.

It could use backslash escapes to denote control characters and Unicode points.

Everyone would agree exactly on what the format is, in contrast to the zoo of CSV variants.

It wouldn't have pitfalls in it, like spaces that defeat quotes

  RFC CSV         JSON strings
  a,"b c"         "a", "b c"
  a, "b c"        "a", " \" b c\""

oops; add an innocuous-looking space, and the quotes are now literal.

1 more reply

koolba1y ago

kccqzy1y ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse