Re: [apps-discuss] draft-snell-merge-patch-08 in Ruby

[Steve Klabnik <[e-mail]>]

> 'null' is a valid JSON value.

Bummer:

(main):001:0> require 'json'
=> true
irb(main):002:0> JSON.parse("null")
JSON::ParserError: 757: unexpected token at 'null'
    from /Users/steve/.gem/ruby/2.0.0/gems/json-1.8.0/lib/json/common.rb:155:in
`parse'
    from /Users/steve/.gem/ruby/2.0.0/gems/json-1.8.0/lib/json/common.rb:155:in
`parse'
    from (irb):2
    from /opt/rubies/2.0.0-p0/bin/irb:12:in `<main>'

> JavaScript will happily accept JSON.parse('null').
> RFC4627 "JSON" limits application/json content to be an object or array, but my guess is that that will be relaxed to allow any JSON value shortly.

Ahhh, there we go. So it's not a valid JSON value. ;)


> Presumably the idea of this site was to return the result of the merge-patch. At the moment it is just echoing the patch.

Uh oh, that's a bummer. I'll look into that.

> Why both removing array elements that are null (obj.compact)?

I took that to be what this meant:

       Any
       object member contained in the provided data whose value is
       explicitly null is to be treated as if the member was undefined.

Since 'null' means 'remove' as the value of a key, I just assumed all
nulls should be removed. I did find this sentence (which is
everywhere) a tad bit confusing.

This could be me mis-reading things.