uneval() does not produce JSON

created 22 April 2006 in blog tagged javascript and programming.

More playing with JSON and Spidermonkey has revealed yet another incredibly annoying fact (I hate those guys). Spidermonkey provides a lovely uneval() function, that does the exact opposite of eval() - turns JS objects into strings. It works on almost everything, and make life very very nice. There’s also Object.toSource() which does something similar (but not the same - try uneval("") vs "".toSource()).

But the strings that uneval produce are not valid JSON, as I have been assuming. I’ve been getting steadily more worked up at all the JSON parsers in the world, refusing to parse things that are clearly valid JavaScript, and eventually I go look at the spec, which fails to list ' as a valid string delimiter. And guess what delimiter uneval produces? Yay. So all the parsers are fine, and it’s just SpiderMonkey that’s broken.

Fortunately, Mochikit provides a nice serializeJSON() function.