[Web-SIG] JSON object names (was Re: Time a for JSON parser in the standard library?)

[Matt Goodall]

Hi,

One thing I keep meaning to mention, prompted by the possibility of
simplejson being sucked into the std lib, is the handling of JSON object
names.

   "An object structure is represented as a pair of curly brackets
   surrounding zero or more name/value pairs (or members).  ***A name is
   a string.***  A single colon comes after each name, separating the
   name from the value." (My emphasis added.)

I noticed simplejson (and others, I suspect) allow more types than just
a string to be given as a name, although they're always deserialised to
unicode instances:

  >>> loads(dumps({'s': None}))
  {u's': None}
  >>> loads(dumps({1: None}))
  {u'1': None}
  >>> loads(dumps({None: None}))
  {u'null': None}
  >>> loads(dumps({True: None}))
  {u'True': None}
  >>>

Am I reading the spec correctly? If so, is it worth explicitly
disallowing anything other than a string when serializing dict keys
before anything gets added to the std lib?


I guess the realy question is, has this been a problem to those who use
JSON a lot to make it worth changing?


- Matt