Serialization to JSON5?

[mortie]

You can already serialize to JSON (which is valid JSON5) with JsonCpp, using the << operator. However, I guess it could be nice to serialize to "better" JSON5 too, with non-quoted identifiers where possible and trailing commas... I'll consider it!

[d9k]

it could be nice to serialize to "better" JSON5 too, with non-quoted identifiers where possible and trailing commas... I'll consider it!

Thanks, that would be great!

[d9k]

and trailing commas

It would be better if JSON5 seialization would be configurable with flags.

Personally I would love omit quotes for identifiers to make resulting .json5 file smaller but contary trailing commas would at to it's size so I was not planning to serialize with them.

[mortie]

I've started implementing this in this branch: https://github.com/mortie/json5cpp/tree/serialize. The API is:

struct Json5::SerializationConfig {
    // Whether or not to add a trailing ',' after the last element
    // of an object/array.
    bool trailingCommas = true;

    // Whether or not to omit quotes in keys when possible.
    bool bareKeys = true;

    // The string used for each level of nesting.
    // Set to 'nullptr' to avoid whitespace completely.
    const char *indent = "\t";
};

void Json5::serialize(
        std::ostream &, const Json::Value &,
        const Json5::SerializationConfig &conf = {}, int depth = 0);

For this input JSON document:

{
    "name": "John Doe",
    "user ID": 99,
    "aliases": [
        "John Smith",
        "Thingum Bob"
    ]
}

it will produce the following JSON5 with trailingCommas=true, bareKeys=true, indent="\t" (the defaults):

{
        aliases: [
                "John Smith",
                "Thingum Bob",
        ],
        name: "John Doe",
        "user ID": 99,
}

With trailingCommas=false, bareKeys=true, indent=nullptr, it produces this compact representation:

{aliases:["John Smith","Thingum Bob"],name:"John Doe","user ID":99}

And with trailingCommas=false and bareKeys=false, it produces valid JSON:

{
        "aliases": [
                "John Smith",
                "Thingum Bob"
        ],
        "name": "John Doe",
        "user ID": 99
}

Does that look satisfactory or is there something that should be supported that I've missed?