Browser-native JSON support (window.JSON)

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I have seen references to some browsers natively supporting JSON parsing/serialization of objects safely and efficiently via the window.JSON Object, but details are hard to come by. Can anyone point in the right direction? What are the methods this Object exposes? What browsers is it supported under?

5 Answers

All modern browsers support native JSON encoding/decoding (Internet Explorer 8+, Firefox 3.1+, Safari 4+, and Chrome 3+). Basically, JSON.parse(str) will parse the JSON string in str and return an object, and JSON.stringify(obj) will return the JSON representation of the object obj.

More details on the MDN article.

jQuery-1.7.1.js - 555 line...

parseJSON: function( data ) {
    if ( typeof data !== "string" || !data ) {
        return null;
    }

    // Make sure leading/trailing whitespace is removed (IE can't handle it)
    data = jQuery.trim( data );

    // Attempt to parse using the native JSON parser first
    if ( window.JSON && window.JSON.parse ) {
        return window.JSON.parse( data );
    }

    // Make sure the incoming data is actual JSON
    // Logic borrowed from http://json.org/json2.js
    if ( rvalidchars.test( data.replace( rvalidescape, "@" )
        .replace( rvalidtokens, "]" )
        .replace( rvalidbraces, "")) ) {

        return ( new Function( "return " + data ) )();

    }
    jQuery.error( "Invalid JSON: " + data );
}





rvalidchars = /^[\],:{}\s]*$/,

rvalidescape = /\\(?:["\\\/bfnrt]|u[0-9a-fA-F]{4})/g,

rvalidtokens = /"[^"\\\n\r]*"|true|false|null|-?\d+(?:\.\d*)?(?:[eE][+\-]?\d+)?/g,

rvalidbraces = /(?:^|:|,)(?:\s*\[)+/g,

For the benefit of anyone who runs into this thread - for an up-to-date, definitive list of browsers that support the JSON object look here.. A brief generic answer - pretty much all browsers that really matter in the year 2013+.

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