What Is JSON (JavaScript Object Notation)

This section provides a quick introduction of JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) - a text string format, similar to XML, that uses human-readable text to record data objects consisting of attribute–value pairs and array structures.

What Is JSON (JavaScript Object Notation)? JSON is a text string format that uses human-readable text to record data objects consisting of attribute–value pairs and array structures.

JSON was specified by Douglas Crockfor in in the early 2000s. It was originally derived from JavaScript, but now supported by many programming languages.

Here is a simple example of a JSON document:

{
    "firstName": "John",
    "lastName": "Smith",
    "isAlive": true,
    "age": 25,
    "address": {
        "streetAddress": "21 2nd Street",
        "city": "New York",
        "state": "NY",
        "postalCode": "10021-3100"
    },
    "phoneNumbers": [
        {
            "type": "home",
            "number": "212 555-1234"
        },
        {
            "type": "office",
            "number": "646 555-4567"
        },
        {
            "type": "mobile",
            "number": "123 456-7890"
        }
    ],
    "children": [],
    "spouse": null
}

As you can see, JSON is a structured text format similar to XML. Both of them can be used to encode complex and hierarchical data objects. But they do have several main differences:

1. JSON has less markup overhead than XML. Since XML requires to repeat the tag name to close each element, the XML presentation is about 5% longer than the JSON presentation of the same data object.

2. JSON has built-in data types. XML support text information only. But XML is extendable. You can add the standard XML Schema Instance to support a wide range of data types.

3. XML comes with additional technologies like XML Schema, XSLT, and XPath to validate, transform and extract the structured data object.

Table of Contents

 About This Book

 Introduction of XML (eXtensible Markup Language)

 XML File Syntax

 XML File Browsers

XML-JSON Document Conversion

What Is JSON (JavaScript Object Notation)

 Convert XML Document to JSON Document

 XML-to-JSON Conversion Rules

 XML-to-JSON Conversion Tool at onlinexmltools.com

 XML-to-JSON Conversion Library for Java

 XML-to-JSON Conversion Module for Python

 Convert JSON Document to XML Document

 JSON-to-XML Conversion Rules

 JSON-to-XML Conversion Tool at onlinexmltools.com

 JSON-to-XML Conversion Library for Java

 JSON-to-XML Conversion Module for Python

 DOM (Document Object Model) Programming Interface

 SAX (Simple API for XML) Programming Interface

 DTD (Document Type Definition) Introduction

 Syntaxes of DTD Statements

 Validating an XML Document against the Specified DTD Document Type

 XSD (XML Schema Definition) Introduction

 Syntaxes of XSD Statements

 Validating XML Documents Against Specified XML Schemas

 XSL (Extensible Stylesheet Language) Introduction

 Java Implementation of XSLT

 XSLT (XSL Transformations) Introduction

 XPath (XML Path) Language

 XSLT Elements as Programming Statements

 Control and Generate XML Element in the Result

 PHP Extensions for XML Manipulation

 Processing XML with Python Scripts

 XML Notepad - XML Editor

 XML Tools Plugin for Notepad++

 XML Plugin Packages for Atom Editor

 XML 1.1 Changes and Parsing Examples

 Archived Tutorials

 References

 Full Version in PDF/EPUB