Comments on: Simple automatic JSON serializer in ActionScript

By: Khelkun

Khelkun — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 15:14:06 +0000

Hi there
I’m looking on a way to improve this algo effeciency : http://www.json.org/json.as

Thanks for the work of Trannie Carter but there’s seems to be a big gap of performance between this algorithm and the one we could find on some other script languages like Lua.

Is the version you give here faster than the original one ?
If not, could confirm this algorithm is really slow on a big json string ?

By: aral

aral — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 19:36:26 +0000

The final version of what I’m using it for isn’t JSON but it’s related — oh, the suspense ;) I hope to announce it next week, before Thursday.

By: Bob Ippolito

Bob Ippolito — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 08:11:06 +0000

Unfortunately no, I try to know as little about Wordpress as possible.

I’d definitely like to see what you’re cooking up. We don’t do any JSON with Flash, but it’d be nice if it was the easy and obvious way to do things. XML is annoying, and remoting is proprietary.

By: aral

aral — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 07:10:49 +0000

Hi Bob,

Thanks for the feedback. I do share your concerns regarding the implementation but believe me there is a use case for it :) (It’s going to become clearer when I release the little pet project I’ve been working on for the past two weeks.)

I’ll definitely take a look at the files you mentioned and sorry the comments system messed up your code. Know any good plugins for Wordpress that handle that better?

Thanks again for sharing.

By: Bob Ippolito

Bob Ippolito — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 16:02:00 +0000

Oof! Your comment plugin is sure hostile to code…

Well, look at encode_basestring_ascii in simplejson/encode.py if you want to see how I implemented the UTF-16 surrogate pair stuff.

There’s also simplejson/_speedups.c that escapes characters with ascii_escape_char — that’s probably even more directly rape paste translatable to ActionScript.

By: Bob Ippolito

Bob Ippolito — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 15:59:15 +0000

Oh, and the string escaping seems to imply that the remote end is going to understand UTF-8 properly (or whatever codec Flash encodes text with by default). It might be worth checking for text with a char code of >= ‘ ‘ && > 10) & 0×3ff)
s2 = 0xdc00 | (n & 0×3ff)
return ‘\\ux\\ux’ % (s1, s2)

By: Bob Ippolito

Bob Ippolito — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 15:46:43 +0000

Personally I’d have done it without overriding built-in methods on the prototypes, or at least adding a different one (and making it non-enumerable). Maybe someone is already using toString for some other kind of serialization? It’s also very unsafe — serialization of anything that implements its own toString will almost surely net you an invalid JSON document.

By: aral

aral — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 19:00:30 +0000

Coolness. Sorry about the typo on your nick — fixed that too :)

By: Madarco

Madarco — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 15:02:30 +0000

Sure, now it works fine, good work :)

Ps. my nick is mAdarco :P

By: aral

aral — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 14:27:42 +0000

Hey Madarco,

*Quite* a few lines, I apparently should’ve said! :) I’ve updated the post and the download. Strings should now be correctly escaped.

Now, if only we had a Character class, the code could have been simplified even further ;)