JSURL

JSURL is an alternative to JSON + URL encoding (or JSON + base64 encoding).
It makes it handy to pass complex values via URL query parameters.

JSURL has been designed to be:

* Compact: its output is much more compact than JSON + URL encoding (except in pathological cases).
It is even often slightly more compact than regular JSON!
* Readable: its output is much more readable than JSON + URL encoding.
* Foolproof: its output only contains characters that are unaffected by URL encoding/decoding.
There is no risk of missing a URL encoding/decoding pass, or of messing up a JSURL string by applying
an extra URL encoding or decoding pass.
* Easy to generate and parse

Syntax

Think of it as JSON with the following changes:

* Curly braces ({ and }) replaced by parentheses (( and ))
* Square brackets ([ and ]) replaced by (~ and )
* Property names unquoted (but escaped -- see below).
* String values prefixed by a single quote (') and escaped
* All other JSON punctuation (colon : and comma ,) replaced by tildes (~)
* An extra tilde (~) at the very beginning.

Property names and string values are escaped as follows:

* Letters, digits, underscore (_), hyphen (-) and dot (.) are preserved.
* Dollar sign ($) is replaced by exclamation mark (!)
Other characters with UNICODE value <= 0xff are encoded as XX
Characters with UNICODE value > 0xff are encoded as *XXXX

Examples

JSON:

``json {"name":"John Doe","age":42,"children":["Mary","Bill"]}`

JSON + URL encoding:

`%7B%22name%22%3A%22John%20Doe%22%2C%22age%22%3A42%2C%22children%22%3A%5B%22Mary%22%2C%22Bill%22%5D%7D`

JSURL:

`jsurl ~(name~'John*20Doe~age~42~children~(~'Mary~'Bill))`

`API`

`javascript var JSURL = require("jsurl");

str = JSURL.stringify(obj); obj = JSURL.parse(str);

// return def instead of throwing on error obj = JSURL.tryParse(str[, def]);`

`Installation`

The easiest way to install jsurl is with NPM:

`sh npm install jsurl``