There's an older pure Python version but it's no longer maintained - the author of that recently replaced it with a Python library wrapping the C# code.
This looks to me like the perfect opportunity for a language-independent conformance suite - a set of tests defined as data files that can be shared across multiple implementations.
This would not only guarantee that the existing C# and TypeScript implementations behaved exactly the same way, but would also make it much easier to build and then maintain more implementations across other languages.
That new Python library is https://pypi.org/project/fractured-json/ but it's a wrapper around the C# library and says "You must install a valid .NET runtime" - that makes it mostly a non-starter as a dependency for other Python projects because it breaks the ability to "pip install" them without a significant extra step.
And OK it's not equivalent to a formal proof, but passing 1,000+ tests that cover every aspect of the specification is pretty close from a practical perspective, especially for a visual formatting tool.
UC Berkeley: “Top-level functional equivalence requires that, for any possible set of inputs x, the two pieces of code produce the same output. … testing, or input-output (I/O) equivalence, is the default correctness metric used by the community. … It is infeasible to guarantee full top-level functional equivalence (i.e., equivalence for any value of x) with testing since this would require testing on a number of inputs so large as to be
practically infinite.”
In practice mutation fuzz testers are able to whitebox see where branches are in the underlying code, with a differential fuzz test under that approach its generally able to fuzz over test cases that go over all branches.
So I think under some computer science theory case for arbitrary functions its not possible, but for the actual shape of behavior in question from this library I think its realistic that a decent corpus of 'real' examples and then differential fuzzing would give you more confidence that anyone has in nearly any program's correctness here on real Earth.
Well yeah, but then any discrepancies that are found can be discussed (to decide which of the behaviors is the expected one) and then added as a test for all existing and future implementations.
RCL (https://github.com/ruuda/rcl) pretty-prints its output by default. Pipe to `rcl e` to pretty-print RCL (which has slightly lighter key-value syntax, good if you only want to inspect it), while `rcl je` produces json output.
It doesn’t align tables like FracturedJson, but it does format values on a single line where possible. The pretty printer is based on the classic A Prettier Printer by Philip Wadler; the algorithm is quite elegant. Any value will be formatted wide if it fits the target width, otherwise tall.
When I want something more readable than json I usually use nushell (https://www.nushell.sh/book/types_of_data.html) The syntax is almost the same (minus a few unnecessary quotes and commas) and you can just pipe through "from json" and "to json" to convert.
My limited experience is that even people who don't know nushell can read it pretty well, and github knows how to syntax highlight it in markdown code blocks.
What I see as most valuable here though is the middle ground between too-sparse pretty printing, and too-compact non-pretty printing, nu doesn't give me that by default.
Now I find myself wanting to write a nutshell autoformatter which does that too.
Love the spirit, but the attack-plans example IMO looks worse with this formatting. I don’t love the horizontal scrolling through properties of an object.
Can you tell me what was the context that lead you to create this?
Unrelated JSON experience:
I worked on a serializer which save/load json files as well as binary file (using a common interface).
From my own use case I found JSON to be restrictive for no benefit (because I don't use it in a Javascript ecosystem)
So I change the json format into something way more lax (optional comma, optional colon, optional quotes, multi line string, comments).
I wish we would stop pretending JSON to be a good human-readable format outside of where it make sense and we would have a standard alternative for those json-centric case.
I know a lot of format already exists but none really took off so far.
Basically, for better or worse JSON is here to stay. It exists in all standard libraries. Swift's codec system revolves around it (it only handles types that are compatible with JSON).
It sucks, but we're stuck with JSON. So the idea here is to make it suck a little less by stopping all this insane text processing for data that never ever meets a human directly.
The progression I envisage is:
1. Dev reaches for JSON because it's easy and ubiquitous.
2. Dev switches to BONJSON because it's more efficient and requires no changes to their code other than changing the codec library.
3. Dev switches to a sane format after the complexity of their app reaches a certain level where a substantial code change is warranted.
That's neat, but I'm much more intrigued by your Concise Encoding project[1]. I see that it only has a single Go reference implementation that hasn't been updated in 3 years. Is the project still relevant?
I'm actually having second thoughts with Concise Encoding. It's gotten very big with all the features it has, which makes it less likely to be adopted (people don't like new things).
This is interesting.
I’d very much like to see a code formatter do that kind of thing; currently formatters are pretty much inflexible, which makes getting structure out of a formatted code sometimes hard.
I just built a C++ formatter that does this (owned by my employee, unfortunately). There's really only two formatting objects: tab-aligned tables, and single line rows. Both objects also support a right-floating column/tab aligned "//" comment.
Both objects desugar to a sequence of segments (lines).
The result is that you can freely mix expression/assignment blocks & statements. Things like switch-case blocks & macro tables are suddenly trivial to format in 2d.
Because comments are handled as right floating, all comments nicely align.
I vibe coded the base layer in an hour. I'm using with autogenerated code, so output is manually coded based on my input. The tricky bit would be "discovering" tables & block. I'd jus use a combo of an LSP and direct observation of sequential statements.
Right. In my previous work, I wrote a custom XML formatter for making it look table-like which was our use case. Of course, an ideal solution would have been to move away from XML, but can't run away from legacy.
Works right up until you get an entity where the field `comments` is suddenly relevant and then you need to go change everything everywhere. Much better to use the right tool for the job, if you want JSONC, be explicit and use JSONC.
Surely it could be suffixed or keyed with a less likely collision target than this very simplistic example. I suppose JSONC and similar exist, although they are rarely used in the wild in contrast to actual JSON usage, compatibility is important.
Personally, I think if your JSON needs comments then it's probably for config or something the user is expected to edit themselves, and at that point you have better options than plain JSON and adding commentary to the actual payload.
If it's purely for machine consumption then I suspect you might be describing a schema and there are also tools for that.
These JSON files are actually readable, congrats.
I’m wondering whether this could be handled via an additional attached file instead. For example, I could have mycomplexdata.json and an accompanying mycomplexdata.jsonfranc. When the file is opened in the IDE, the IDE would merge the two automatically.
That way, the original JSON file stays clean and isn’t polluted with extra data.
Nice... I like using JSON to stdout for logging, this would be a nice formatting option when doing local dev to prettify it without full decomposition.
This is pretty cool, but I hope it isn't used for human-readable config files. TOML/YAML are better options for that. Git diff also can be tricky with realignment, etc.
I can see potential usefulness of this is in debug mode APIs, where somehow comments are sent as well and are rendered nicely. Especially useful in game dev jsons.
Yeah, but it's a fun slogan. My real peeve is constantly getting the spaces wrong and no tooling to compensete for its warts. If there were linters and test frameworks and unit tests etc for yaml, I'd just sigh and move on. But current situation is, for instance in ADO Yaml: "So it's time to cut a release and time is short - we have a surprise for you! This will make some condition go true which triggers something not tested up till now, you will now randomly commit shit on the release branch until it builds again."
Stuff that would have been structurally impossible in XML will happen in yaml. And I don't even like XML.
Because there's a metric ton of software out there that was built once upon a time and then that bit was never updated. I've seen this issue out in the wild across more industries than I can count.
I tokenized these and they seem to use around 20% less tokens than the original JSONs. Which makes me think a schema like this might optimize latency and costs in constrained LLM decoding.
I know that LLMs are very familiar with JSON, and choosing uncommon schemas just to reduce tokens hurts semantic performance. But a schema that is sufficiently JSON-like probably won't disrupt model path/patterns that much and prevent unintended bias.
Yeah, but I tried switching to minified JSON on a semantic labelling task and saw a ~5% accuracy drop.
I suspect this happened because most of the pre-training corpus was pretty-printed JSON, and the LLM was forced to derail from likely path and also lost all "visual cues" of nesting depth.
This might happen here too, but maybe to a lesser extent. Anyways, I'll stop building castles in the air now and try it sometime.
This looks very readable. The one example I didn't like is the expanded one where it expanded all but 1 of the elements. I feel like that should be an all or norhing thing, but there's bound to be edge cases.
And BTW, thanks for supporting comments - the reason given for keeping comments out of standard Json is silly ( "they would be used for parsing directives" ).
It's a pretty sensible policy, really. Corollary to Hyrum's Law - do not permit your API to have any behaviours, useful or otherwise, which someone might depend on but which aren't part of your design goals. For programmers in particular, who are sodding munchkins and cannot be trusted not to do something clever but unintended just because it solves a problem for them, that means aggressively hamstringing everything.
A flathead screwdriver should bend like rubber if someone tries to use it as a prybar.
> A flathead screwdriver should bend like rubber if someone tries to use it as a prybar.
While I admire his design goals, people will just work around it in a pinch by adding a "comment" or "_comment" or "_comment_${random_uuid}", simply because they want to do the job they need.
If your screwdriver bends like a rubber when prying, damn it, I'll just put a screw next to it, so it thinks it is used for driving screws and thus behaves correctly.
On one hand, it has made json more ubiquitous due to it's frozen state. On another hand, it forces everyone to move to something else and fragments progress. It would be much easier for people to move to json 2.0 rather than having hundreds of json + x standards. Everyone is just reinventing json with their own little twist that I feel sad that we haven't standardized to a single solution that doesn't go super crazy like xml.
I don't disagree with the choice, but seeing how things turned out I can't just help but look at the greener grass on the other side.
JSON is used as config files and static resources all the time. These type of files really need comments. Preventing comments in JSON is punishing the wide majority to prevent a small minority from doing something stupid. But stupid gonna stupid, it's just condescending from Mister JSON to think he can do anything about it.
I was talking about the parent comment, which has spaces inside the parenthesis (I do prefer no spaces inside brackets and braces in my JSONs, but that’s another story).
It looks like there are two maintained implementations of this at the moment - one in C# https://github.com/j-brooke/FracturedJson/wiki/.NET-Library and another in TypeScript/JavaScript https://github.com/j-brooke/FracturedJsonJs. They each have their own test suite.
There's an older pure Python version but it's no longer maintained - the author of that recently replaced it with a Python library wrapping the C# code.
This looks to me like the perfect opportunity for a language-independent conformance suite - a set of tests defined as data files that can be shared across multiple implementations.
This would not only guarantee that the existing C# and TypeScript implementations behaved exactly the same way, but would also make it much easier to build and then maintain more implementations across other languages.
Interestingly the now-deprecated Python library does actually use a data-driven test suite in the kind of shape I'm describing: https://github.com/masaccio/compact-json/tree/main/tests/dat...
That new Python library is https://pypi.org/project/fractured-json/ but it's a wrapper around the C# library and says "You must install a valid .NET runtime" - that makes it mostly a non-starter as a dependency for other Python projects because it breaks the ability to "pip install" them without a significant extra step.
This is a good idea, though I don’t think it would guarantee program equivalence beyond the test cases.
Depends on how comprehensive the test suite is.
And OK it's not equivalent to a formal proof, but passing 1,000+ tests that cover every aspect of the specification is pretty close from a practical perspective, especially for a visual formatting tool.
With mutation testing you can guarantee that all the behavior in the code is tested.
UC Berkeley: “Top-level functional equivalence requires that, for any possible set of inputs x, the two pieces of code produce the same output. … testing, or input-output (I/O) equivalence, is the default correctness metric used by the community. … It is infeasible to guarantee full top-level functional equivalence (i.e., equivalence for any value of x) with testing since this would require testing on a number of inputs so large as to be practically infinite.”
https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2025/EECS-2025-...
In practice mutation fuzz testers are able to whitebox see where branches are in the underlying code, with a differential fuzz test under that approach its generally able to fuzz over test cases that go over all branches.
So I think under some computer science theory case for arbitrary functions its not possible, but for the actual shape of behavior in question from this library I think its realistic that a decent corpus of 'real' examples and then differential fuzzing would give you more confidence that anyone has in nearly any program's correctness here on real Earth.
Well yeah, but then any discrepancies that are found can be discussed (to decide which of the behaviors is the expected one) and then added as a test for all existing and future implementations.
Is there an option for it to read the contents from a pipe? that's by far my biggest use for the jq app.
RCL (https://github.com/ruuda/rcl) pretty-prints its output by default. Pipe to `rcl e` to pretty-print RCL (which has slightly lighter key-value syntax, good if you only want to inspect it), while `rcl je` produces json output.
It doesn’t align tables like FracturedJson, but it does format values on a single line where possible. The pretty printer is based on the classic A Prettier Printer by Philip Wadler; the algorithm is quite elegant. Any value will be formatted wide if it fits the target width, otherwise tall.
There's a C# CLI app in the repo: https://github.com/j-brooke/FracturedJson/blob/main/Fracture...
It looks like both the JavaScript version and the new Python C# wrapper have equivalent CLI tools as well.You can (usually) specify the input file name as “-“ (single hyphen) to read from stdin
this would be amazing to be chained with jq, that was my first thought as well.
When I want something more readable than json I usually use nushell (https://www.nushell.sh/book/types_of_data.html) The syntax is almost the same (minus a few unnecessary quotes and commas) and you can just pipe through "from json" and "to json" to convert.
My limited experience is that even people who don't know nushell can read it pretty well, and github knows how to syntax highlight it in markdown code blocks.
What I see as most valuable here though is the middle ground between too-sparse pretty printing, and too-compact non-pretty printing, nu doesn't give me that by default.
Now I find myself wanting to write a nutshell autoformatter which does that too.
Love the spirit, but the attack-plans example IMO looks worse with this formatting. I don’t love the horizontal scrolling through properties of an object.
This is great! The more human-readable, the better!
I've also been working in the other direction, making JSON more machine-readable:
https://github.com/kstenerud/bonjson/
It has EXACTLY the same capabilities and limitations as JSON, so it works as a drop-in replacement that's 35x faster for a machine to read and write.
No extra types. No extra features. Anything JSON can do, it can do. Anything JSON can't do, it can't do.
Can you tell me what was the context that lead you to create this?
Unrelated JSON experience:
I worked on a serializer which save/load json files as well as binary file (using a common interface).
From my own use case I found JSON to be restrictive for no benefit (because I don't use it in a Javascript ecosystem)
So I change the json format into something way more lax (optional comma, optional colon, optional quotes, multi line string, comments).
I wish we would stop pretending JSON to be a good human-readable format outside of where it make sense and we would have a standard alternative for those json-centric case.
I know a lot of format already exists but none really took off so far.
Basically, for better or worse JSON is here to stay. It exists in all standard libraries. Swift's codec system revolves around it (it only handles types that are compatible with JSON).
It sucks, but we're stuck with JSON. So the idea here is to make it suck a little less by stopping all this insane text processing for data that never ever meets a human directly.
The progression I envisage is:
1. Dev reaches for JSON because it's easy and ubiquitous.
2. Dev switches to BONJSON because it's more efficient and requires no changes to their code other than changing the codec library.
3. Dev switches to a sane format after the complexity of their app reaches a certain level where a substantial code change is warranted.
That's neat, but I'm much more intrigued by your Concise Encoding project[1]. I see that it only has a single Go reference implementation that hasn't been updated in 3 years. Is the project still relevant?
Thanks for sharing your work!
[1]: https://concise-encoding.org/
Thanks!
I'm actually having second thoughts with Concise Encoding. It's gotten very big with all the features it has, which makes it less likely to be adopted (people don't like new things).
I've been toying around with a less ambitious format called ORB: https://github.com/kstenerud/orb
It's essentially an extension of BONJSON (so it can read BONJSON documents natively) that adds extra types and features.
I'm still trying to decide what types will actually be of use in the real world... CE's graph type is cool, but if nobody uses it...
This is interesting. I’d very much like to see a code formatter do that kind of thing; currently formatters are pretty much inflexible, which makes getting structure out of a formatted code sometimes hard.
I just built a C++ formatter that does this (owned by my employee, unfortunately). There's really only two formatting objects: tab-aligned tables, and single line rows. Both objects also support a right-floating column/tab aligned "//" comment.
Both objects desugar to a sequence of segments (lines).
The result is that you can freely mix expression/assignment blocks & statements. Things like switch-case blocks & macro tables are suddenly trivial to format in 2d.
Because comments are handled as right floating, all comments nicely align.
I vibe coded the base layer in an hour. I'm using with autogenerated code, so output is manually coded based on my input. The tricky bit would be "discovering" tables & block. I'd jus use a combo of an LSP and direct observation of sequential statements.
You built it, but your employee owns it? That sounds highly unusual.
Probably a single-letter typo. Makes complete sense if changed to “employer.”
Auto corrected employer?
Right. In my previous work, I wrote a custom XML formatter for making it look table-like which was our use case. Of course, an ideal solution would have been to move away from XML, but can't run away from legacy.
While I wish JSON formally supported comments, it seems more sensible (compatible) to just nest them inside of a keyed list or object as strings.
Works right up until you get an entity where the field `comments` is suddenly relevant and then you need to go change everything everywhere. Much better to use the right tool for the job, if you want JSONC, be explicit and use JSONC.
Hadn't heard of JSONC, but I've always been a proponent of JSON5 for this reason.
https://github.com/json5/json5
Surely it could be suffixed or keyed with a less likely collision target than this very simplistic example. I suppose JSONC and similar exist, although they are rarely used in the wild in contrast to actual JSON usage, compatibility is important.
Personally, I think if your JSON needs comments then it's probably for config or something the user is expected to edit themselves, and at that point you have better options than plain JSON and adding commentary to the actual payload.
If it's purely for machine consumption then I suspect you might be describing a schema and there are also tools for that.
These JSON files are actually readable, congrats. I’m wondering whether this could be handled via an additional attached file instead. For example, I could have mycomplexdata.json and an accompanying mycomplexdata.jsonfranc. When the file is opened in the IDE, the IDE would merge the two automatically.
That way, the original JSON file stays clean and isn’t polluted with extra data.
Nice... I like using JSON to stdout for logging, this would be a nice formatting option when doing local dev to prettify it without full decomposition.
This is pretty cool, but I hope it isn't used for human-readable config files. TOML/YAML are better options for that. Git diff also can be tricky with realignment, etc.
I can see potential usefulness of this is in debug mode APIs, where somehow comments are sent as well and are rendered nicely. Especially useful in game dev jsons.
Yaml is the worst. Humans and LLMs alike get it wrong. I used to laugh at XML but Yaml made me look at XML wistfully.
Yaml - just say Norway
The Norway issue is a bit blown out of proportion seeing as the country should really be a string `"no"` rather than the `no` value
YAML strings should really require delimiters rather than being context-dependent.
Yeah, but it's a fun slogan. My real peeve is constantly getting the spaces wrong and no tooling to compensete for its warts. If there were linters and test frameworks and unit tests etc for yaml, I'd just sigh and move on. But current situation is, for instance in ADO Yaml: "So it's time to cut a release and time is short - we have a surprise for you! This will make some condition go true which triggers something not tested up till now, you will now randomly commit shit on the release branch until it builds again."
Stuff that would have been structurally impossible in XML will happen in yaml. And I don't even like XML.
Just say Norway to YAML.
This is a reference to YAML parsing the two letter ISO country code for Norway:
As equivalent to a boolean falsy value: It is a relatively common source of problems. One solution is to escape the value: More context: https://www.bram.us/2022/01/11/yaml-the-norway-problem/We stopped having this problem over ten years ago when spec 1.1 was implemented. Why are people still harking on about it?
Because there's a metric ton of software out there that was built once upon a time and then that bit was never updated. I've seen this issue out in the wild across more industries than I can count.
Now add brackets and end-tags, I'll reconsider. ;)
Brackets works fine:
End tags, that I’m not sure what that is. But three dashes is part of the spec to delineate sections:Because once a technology develops a reputation for having a problem it's practically impossible to rehabilitate it.
I tokenized these and they seem to use around 20% less tokens than the original JSONs. Which makes me think a schema like this might optimize latency and costs in constrained LLM decoding.
I know that LLMs are very familiar with JSON, and choosing uncommon schemas just to reduce tokens hurts semantic performance. But a schema that is sufficiently JSON-like probably won't disrupt model path/patterns that much and prevent unintended bias.
Minified json would use even less tokens
Yeah, but I tried switching to minified JSON on a semantic labelling task and saw a ~5% accuracy drop.
I suspect this happened because most of the pre-training corpus was pretty-printed JSON, and the LLM was forced to derail from likely path and also lost all "visual cues" of nesting depth.
This might happen here too, but maybe to a lesser extent. Anyways, I'll stop building castles in the air now and try it sometime.
This looks very readable. The one example I didn't like is the expanded one where it expanded all but 1 of the elements. I feel like that should be an all or norhing thing, but there's bound to be edge cases.
Nice.
And BTW, thanks for supporting comments - the reason given for keeping comments out of standard Json is silly ( "they would be used for parsing directives" ).
It's a pretty sensible policy, really. Corollary to Hyrum's Law - do not permit your API to have any behaviours, useful or otherwise, which someone might depend on but which aren't part of your design goals. For programmers in particular, who are sodding munchkins and cannot be trusted not to do something clever but unintended just because it solves a problem for them, that means aggressively hamstringing everything.
A flathead screwdriver should bend like rubber if someone tries to use it as a prybar.
> A flathead screwdriver should bend like rubber if someone tries to use it as a prybar.
While I admire his design goals, people will just work around it in a pinch by adding a "comment" or "_comment" or "_comment_${random_uuid}", simply because they want to do the job they need.
If your screwdriver bends like a rubber when prying, damn it, I'll just put a screw next to it, so it thinks it is used for driving screws and thus behaves correctly.
And we wonder why people are calling for licensed professional software engineers.
On one hand, it has made json more ubiquitous due to it's frozen state. On another hand, it forces everyone to move to something else and fragments progress. It would be much easier for people to move to json 2.0 rather than having hundreds of json + x standards. Everyone is just reinventing json with their own little twist that I feel sad that we haven't standardized to a single solution that doesn't go super crazy like xml.
I don't disagree with the choice, but seeing how things turned out I can't just help but look at the greener grass on the other side.
> A flathead screwdriver should bend like rubber if someone tries to use it as a prybar.
Better not let me near your JSON files then. I pound in wall anchors with the bottom of my drill if my hammer is not within arms reach.
JSON is used as config files and static resources all the time. These type of files really need comments. Preventing comments in JSON is punishing the wide majority to prevent a small minority from doing something stupid. But stupid gonna stupid, it's just condescending from Mister JSON to think he can do anything about it.
XML people were doing crazy things in the Java/.NET world and "<!--[if IE 6]>" was still a thing in HTML when JSON was being designed.
I also would have wanted comments, but I see why Crockford must have been skeptical. He just didn't want JSON to be the next XML.
Unrelated: why spaces inside the parentheses? It’s not the first time I see this, but this is incorrect!
JSON doesn't have parentheses, but it does have braces and brackets. The JSON spec specifically allows spaces.
> Insignificant whitespace is allowed before or after any token.
I was talking about the parent comment, which has spaces inside the parenthesis (I do prefer no spaces inside brackets and braces in my JSONs, but that’s another story).
Great. Now integrate this into every JSON library and tool so I get to see it's output more often
I think integration into jq would be both powerful and sufficient.
Powerful but not sufficient. There’s plenty of us who don’t use jq for various reasons.
LLMs have allowed me to start using jq for more than pretty printing JSON.