Re: [apps-discuss] JSON Patch

[Julian Reschke <[e-mail]>]

On 2011-11-25 02:58, Manger, James H wrote:
>>> <[e-mail]>   wrote:
>>>> On escaping: how about replacing every '/' in an object member's name with the Unicode REPLACEMENT CHARACTER U+FFFD when creating a JSON pointer.
>
>> On 2011/11/24 11:08, Martin Thomson wrote:
>>> Interesting that you choose U+FFFD in the same way that backslash was
>>> chosen as an escape character in the first place.  I'm not a big fan
>>> of that approach.
>
> On 2011/11/24, Martin J. Dürst wrote:
>> Yes, please don't. The semantics of U+FFFD is mostly a character that
>> wasn't successfully converted from some other encoding. Overloading that
>> with "escaping a slash" is a bad idea.
>
> JSON pointer theoretically needs a proper escaping mechanism since it reserves 1 char as a delimiter. However, choosing 1 char not to support avoids a fair amount of inevitable confusion and complexity. I chose U+FFFD REPLACEMENT CHARACTER. If you don’t like that choice, how about U+001F INFOMATION SEPARATOR ONE.

I like that; it avoids adding a whole new escaping sequence, and I think 
it's ok to sacrifice compatibility with identifiers that contain control 
characters.

> Not supporting pointers for names with, say, a U+FFFD char is not ideal but hinders almost no practical uses.
> Escaping '/' with '\/' could be worse. It seems certain to cause significant confusion. You can no longer simply split a pointer on '/' characters, but need to use, say, a regular expression to parse a pointer. A / can be legitimately escaped in a JSON string as "\/", and apparently often is [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1580647/json-why-are-forward-slashes-escaped] so developers will read and write 0, 1, 2, or 3 backslashes (but only 1 %2F), when they are dealing with a name with a '/', or a '\'. Will "\x" be undefined when x isn’t \ or /?
>
> Object member name:
> Logically:  Bjørn/Carsten and bar
> In JSON  : "Bjørn/Carsten" and "bar"
>        Or : "Bjørn\/Carsten" and "bar"
>
> JSON pointer:
> Logically:  Bjørn\/Carsten/bar
> In JSON  : "Bjørn\\/Carsten/bar"
>        Or : "Bjørn\\\/Carsten\/bar"
> In IRI   :  Bjørn%2F/Carsten/bar
> ...

Not sure I get the example.

So, the member name is

   Bjørn/Carsten and bar

in JSON, that's

   "Bjørn/Carsten and bar"

no?

In JSON pointer with 0x1f-substution we get (serialized as JSON):

   "/Bjørn\u001fCarsten and bar"

In an IRI, we'd have:

   /Bjørn%1FCarsten%20and%20bar

and, in a URI:

   /Bj%C3%B8rn%1FCarsten%20and%20bar

Best regards, Julian