JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) Text Sequences
draft-ietf-json-text-sequence-05

Abstract

This document describes the JSON text sequence format and associated media type.

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Table of Contents

• 1. Introduction and Motivation
• 1.1. JSON Parser Types
• 1.2. Conventions used in this document
• 2. JSON Text Sequence Format
• 2.1. Incomplete JSON texts need not be fatal
• 2.2. Interoperability note
• 3. Security Considerations
• 4. IANA Considerations
• 5. Acknowledgements
• 6. Normative References
• Author's Address

1. Introduction and Motivation

The JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) [RFC7159] is a very handy serialization format. However, when serializing a large sequence of values as an array, or a possibly indeterminate-length or never-ending sequence of values, JSON becomes difficult to work with.

Consider a sequence of one million values, each possibly 1 kilobyte when encoded -- roughly one gigabyte. It is often desirable to process such a dataset in an incremental manner: without having to first read all of it before beginning to produce results. Traditionally the way to do this with JSON is to use a “streaming” parser (see Section 1.1), but these are neither widely available, widely used, nor easy to use.

This document describes the concept and format of “JSON text sequences”, which are specifically not JSON texts themselves but are composed of JSON texts. JSON text sequences can be parsed (and produced) incrementally without having to have a streaming parser (nor encoder).

1.1. JSON Parser Types

For the purposes of this document we shall classify JSON parsers as follows:

Streaming

Consumes a text incrementally, outputs values incrementally (e.g., as (path, leaf value) pairs).

Online

Consumes a text incrementally.

Off-line

Consumes only complete texts.

1.2. Conventions used in this document

The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this document are to be interpreted as described in [RFC2119].

2. JSON Text Sequence Format

The ABNF [RFC5234] for the JSON text sequence format is as given in Figure 1.

  JSON-sequence = *(1*RS JSON-text)
  RS = <given by RFC5234>
  JSON-text = <given by RFC7159>