JSON Parsing

Claro strives to make development easier in many ways, and as being able to write programs that interact with the network is an important goal, Claro has some initial support for automatically generating efficient JSON parsers for relatively arbitrary formats. If you know the schema of the JSON data that you'll be interacting with, and can describe it as some Claro struct, then in general you can automatically parse JSON data from a string directly into the Claro type.

Claro's JSON parsing is implemented by generating a custom parser for the target data format at compile time. So, in addition to ergonomic improvements, this approach offers potential performance benefits over a general-purpose JSON parser.

For example, the following JSON string could be included in a Resource File:

Fig 1:

{
  "server_name": "My Server",
  "port": 8080,
  "logging": {
    "filename": "server.log"
  },
  "database": {
    "host": "localhost",
    "port": 5432,
    "database_name": "my_database"
  }
}

We can represent that JSON format as the following Claro data structure:

Fig 2:

alias ServerConfig : struct {
  server_name: string,
  port: int,
  logging: struct {
    filename: string
  },
  database: struct {
    host: string,
    port: int,
    database_name: string
  }
}

And now, the JSON string can be parsed by a simple call to the fromJson(...) builtin function:

Fig 3:

resources::ServerConfigJSON
  |> files::readOrPanic(^)
  |> var parsedConfig: std::ParsedJson<ServerConfig> = fromJson(^);

var parsedResult = unwrap(parsedConfig).result;
if (parsedResult instanceof ServerConfig) {
  print("Config has correct format and was parsed successfully!");
  print(strings::repeated("-", 50));
  print("Server Name: {parsedResult.server_name}");
  print("Port:        {parsedResult.port}");
} else {
  print("JSON parsing failed!");
  print(parsedResult);
}

Output:

Config has correct format and was parsed successfully!
--------------------------------------------------
Server Name: My Server
Port:        8080

Limitations