I have a bunch of files each having a json object. I wanted to write some server side javascript code to process this data. The files can be very large (can be as big as 10 MB) and so initially thought of using V8 javascript engine. That’s when I realized that I can’t write pure JavaScript code to get things done when there are requirements like reading from a local file. But I knew about Node.js and so quickly started looking into the documentation and started writing the javascript code.
The code is very simple
var fs = require('fs');
var json = fs.readFileSync("./json.txt","utf8");
var x = JSON.parse(json);
But this threw an error
undefined:1
{'Search':'AjaxSearch2','Query':'AjaxSearch2
^
SyntaxError: Unexpected token '
at Object.parse (native)
at Object. (/private/tmp/d/test.js:3:14)
at Module._compile (module.js:449:26)
at Object.Module._extensions..js (module.js:467:10)
at Module.load (module.js:356:32)
at Function.Module._load (module.js:312:12)
at Module.runMain (module.js:492:10)
at process.startup.processNextTick.process._tickCallback (node.js:244:9)
Apparently the strings in a JSON object are supposed to be double quoted. Since I don’t have control over the json files, I was trying to find ways to fix this. Finally, I settled for the following which may be a bit slower but does what I need it to do.
var fs = require('fs');
var json = fs.readFileSync("json.txt","utf8");
//var x = JSON.parse(json);
eval("var x = "+json);
Note that using
var x = eval(json)
didn’t work either (it gives the same Unexpected token error for ‘:’).
I see two performance issues with this approach
1) Unnecessary concatenation of the string “var x = ” to a 10mb string (in my case)
2) eval is lot more generic that can parse any javascript string which can be slow compared to a well optimized JSON parser.
Well, sometimes you have to give up performance for ease of coding.
poeticcode 