What is the minimum valid JSON?

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At the time of writing, JSON was solely described in RFC4627. It describes (at the start of “2”) a JSON text as being a serialized object or array.

This means that only {} and [] are valid, complete JSON strings in parsers and stringifiers which adhere to that standard.

However, the introduction of ECMA-404 changes that, and the updated advice can be read here. I’ve also written a blog post on the issue.

To confuse the matter further however, the JSON object (e.g. JSON.parse() and JSON.stringify()) available in web browsers is standardised in ES5, and that clearly defines the acceptable JSON texts like so:

The JSON interchange format used in this specification is exactly that described by RFC 4627 with two exceptions:

  • The top level JSONText production of the ECMAScript JSON grammar may consist of any JSONValue rather than being restricted to being a JSONObject or a JSONArray as specified by RFC 4627.

  • snipped

This would mean that all JSON values (including strings, nulls and numbers) are accepted by the JSON object, even though the JSON object technically adheres to RFC 4627.

Note that you could therefore stringify a number in a conformant browser via JSON.stringify(5), which would be rejected by another parser that adheres to RFC4627, but which doesn’t have the specific exception listed above. Ruby, for example, would seem to be one such example which only accepts objects and arrays as the root. PHP, on the other hand, specifically adds the exception that “it will also encode and decode scalar types and NULL”.

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