Re: additional json functionality

On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 12:59 PM, Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> wrote:
> On 11/19/2013 08:14 AM, Robert Haas wrote:
>> On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 2:54 PM, Hannu Krosing <hannu(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
>>> I am sure you could also devise an json encoding scheme
>>> where white space is significant ;)
>>
>> I don't even have to think hard. If you want your JSON to be
>> human-readable, it's entirely possible that you want it stored using
>> the same whitespace that was present on input. There is a valid use
>> case for normalizing whitespace, too, of course.
>
> Given that JSON is a data interchange format, I suspect that there are
> an extremely large combination of factors which would result in an
> unimplementably large number of parser settings. For example, I
> personally would have use for a type which allowed the storage of JSON
> *fragments*. Therefore I am interested only in supporting two:
>
> a) the legacy behavior from 9.2 and 9.3 so we don't destroy people's
> apps, and
>
> b) the optimal behavior for Hstore2/JSONB.
>
> (a) is defined as:
> * complete documents only (no fragments)
> * whitespace not significant
> * no reordering of keys
> * duplicate keys allowed
>
> (b) is defined as:
> * complete documents only (no fragments)
> * whitespace not significant
> * reordering of keys
> * duplicate keys prohibited
>
> If people want other manglings of JSON, they can use TEXT fields and
> custom parsers written in PL/v8, the same way I do.

For (a), I assume you mean "whitespace not significant, but
preserved", because that is the current behavior, whereas for (b), I
think we would want to say "whitespace neither significant nor
preserved". Other than that, I completely agree.

--
Robert Haas
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