Teaching Kids Programming – What is JSON? Simply Explained

Teaching Kids Programming: Videos on Data Structures and Algorithms

Explaining JSON to Kids

JSON – JavaScript Object Notation. This is a lightweight data interexchange format that we use to store and transport the data, which is most commonly used in client/server applications.

JSON is easy to understand and also easy to parse and generate by computers (We have efficient algorithms to encode/decode or serialize/de-serialize JSON).

A JSON consists of an object or an array. However, some standards allow JSON to contain a value type: single string, number or true, false, null.

• “{}” – this is a valid JSON string that contains an empty object.
• “[]” – this is a valid JSON string that contains an empty array.
• “‘1′” – this is a valid JSON string that contains a number.
• “‘true'” – this is a valid JSON string that contains the constant/literal true.
• “‘false'” – this is a valid JSON string that contains the constant/literal false.
• “‘null'” – this is a valid JSON string that contains the constant/literal null.
• “‘hello'” – this is a valid JSON string that contains a single word e.g. “Hello”

JSON Value Type

An object is like a dictionary that has key-value pairs. The keys have to be within double-quotes. A value could be an object, an array of value-type, a number, a string, or constants.

{
  "foo": {
     "bar": {
        "tah": [1, 2, 3],
        "ahx": "abc",
        "kkk": true,
        "xyz": ["abc", 123, {
            "foo": 123
        }]
     }
   }
}

Array elements and key-value pairs are delimiter by comma.

In Python, we can import json and it provides dumps to serialize an variable to a JSON string. And use the loads function to parse a JSON string to a variable.

import json
a = json.loads("{}")
b = json.dumps(a) # "{}"

Does JSON Support Comments?

JSON doesn’t support comments. Everything in JSON is data.

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