JSON : Naughty parsing is still allowed

Developers Kindergarten

This issue is alive and well. Chronological updates are at the bottom of the text.

JSON parsing? Well, that surely must be easy, is it not? Native JSON object is here, why should anyone now worry about Cross-browser JSON parsing, into the ES5 objects? After all, JSON has very simple syntactical rules.

 

Base JSON syntax
Base JSON syntax

 

Yes, that line of thinking might be a sensible approach. But how is the issue of using “nonstandard” JSON strings solved in your “cross-browser javascript”?

Ok, let us dive deep, without hesitation.

IE8: JSON.parse("{ 'a':1 }") Syntax Error
CHROME JSON.parse("{ 'a':1 }") OK
FF JSON.parse("{ 'a':1 }") Syntax Error
OPERA 10.10 JSON.parse("{ 'a':1 }") Undefined variable JSON
SAFARI 4.0.4 JSON.parse("{ 'a':1 }") Syntax Error

See the problem? Your ES5 code receives JSON strings that are out of your control. And standard JSON string has to be embedded in single quotes and property names have to be in double quotes. Like so:

The problem is that not every browser follows this simple rule. While CHROME 4.x, which is/was a browser with a (very) a significant number of users, does not. That is perhaps not such a big issue. The big issue is that today on the WWW there is a large number of legacy systems connected to it, all passing JSON “almost-standard” (aka “illegal”) strings around.

I suppose, now you might reply: “…OK, why support nonstandard usage … ?”. And then someone else might reply: “but CHROME does”? Ad infinitum … Instead of endless debate, I suggest a slight detour.  Here is the trick: JSON.parse() does not have to be used to “parse” JSON strings. The good old Function() approach, “just works” :

The above “trick” works in each browser, regardless of the fact that string passed in, sometimes is not a proper JSON syntax. This works everywhere, including IE8, FF, and SAFARI where JSON.parse("{'a':1}") dutifully throws an exception. The above trick also works in browsers that have no JSON as a native object at all. End of detour.

In case you feel safe, I am sorry to tell you, this worketh today in my CHROME 93.0.X.

Good in case you want to support it. I don’t. Here is why.

By now perhaps you might want to adopt a more sensible approach? No compromise approach where your library will NOT allow for non-standard JSON strings, anymore!

Maybe I did not say it clearly enough, so I will do it now: I agree 100% with a no-compromise approach to “almost-standard” (aka illegal) JSON strings. It is only that in reality, there are well-known and (commercial) paid for RESTfull services, which return this wrong kind of JSON.

Especially this kind: ” { look-ma-no-quotes : 1 }” is, it seems, in widespread use. No quotes whatsoever around names.

What is also relevant in this context, is that there are other JSON issues, especially security ones. Issues much larger than the travails of any JavaScript library out there. And they need to be ultimately re-solved by W3C, IEEE, http://www.soa-standards.org/, etc …, not jQuery, Dojo or any other “ninja” team. In my opinion, the best one can do, for her library, is to document these issues. And that will immediately show if the browser of choice is capable of NOT legal JSON parsing.

What is especially worrying is that new kinds of “AJAX” (not AJAX) platforms are starting to appear. Non-dom and non ES5 code, which “just” uses the idea of  REST (JSON + HTTP). Like Node.js or Ruby apps or Python Tornado… all happily working without dom, JavaScript, or browsers. And which talk to some external and proprietary server-side quaky “REST”, (not REST).

This issue is old news with XML, but XML text is not a source of any programming language. JSON is much more dangerous since it actually is source code, not a document markup language like XML is.

As a very good example. In CHROME 4.x  window.JSON.parse will happily parse "{ 'a' : 1 }" which is not standard. It will even parse "{ a : 1}", and yes it will also parse this :

In your organization, You might want to allow for this or not. It is up to you. I would not. Actually the simplest “way out” is to check in your JavaScript library which browser it is currently in. In the case of omnipresent jQuery, I would add new jQuery.support member :

As far as I know “only” in CHROME, the above yields true (Tested up to CHROME 4.0.302.3):

Having this in place, one can go ahead and implement her JSON parsing logic. Here is my attempt :

Above is definitely a “slow and safe” approach. Perhaps this is good enough, to represent a safe cross-browser JSON parsing mechanism?

Update: 2010 Feb 01

I made a little “fuss” on the V8 (Chrome JavaScript engine) “Issues” forum, and today it appears to be fixed: http://code.google.com/p/v8/issues/detail?id=372 . So in “V8”, JSON.parse() , now works as it should. Therefore some near future CHROME updates will not fall into “case 1” anymore, in the code above.

Update: 2013 Jan 29

Of course, 3 years after the situation is much better in every major browser. But. These days we have a multitude of mobile device browsers that have to be tested. Not an easy task but there are teams doing it. This is nothing less than a good thing because this kind of code wakes me up in the early morning in a cold sweat:

The whole Internet might actually not be as safe as we think it is, yes?

Update: 2021 Sep

I was assured javascript “ES5” testing suite is alive and well; alas somewhere in the clouds. I assume, brave researchers might find it by visiting ECMA-262.

–DBJ

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