Damien Riquet

Short vitae

I'm Damien Riquet, 24 years old, a PhD. Student within the 2XS research group at the University of Lille 1 (France). I hold a Master Degree (french equivalent of an MSc) in Computer Science from the University of Lille 1. My PhD (funded by the French Research Ministry), under the supervision of Gilles Grimaud and Michaël Hauspie, is about including Embedded probes for Cloud Security.

This website presents my research interests, publications and some blog entries.

Parse a JSON file with comments

I like to use JSON files with python. It's very simple to read and use such files. For example:

JSON file

{
    "username": "John Smith",
    "age": 42,
    "list": ["a", "b", "c"]
}

Python script

import json

with open('file.json') as f:
    d = json.load(f)
    print d['username']
    print d['age']
    print ','.join(d['list'])

will print:

John Smith
42
a,b,c

I usually use JSON files to configure scripts. And such files could become easily unreadable. That's why I wanted to include some comments, but unfortunately JSON files cannot contain comments.

So I wrote a short piece of Python code that wraps the JSON parser:

import json
import re

# Regular expression for comments
comment_re = re.compile(
    '(^)?[^\S\n]*/(?:\*(.*?)\*/[^\S\n]*|/[^\n]*)($)?',
    re.DOTALL | re.MULTILINE
)

def parse_json(filename):
    """ Parse a JSON file
        First remove comments and then use the json module package
        Comments look like :
            // ...
        or
            /*
            ...
            */
    """
    with open(filename) as f:
        content = ''.join(f.readlines())

        ## Looking for comments
        match = comment_re.search(content)
        while match:
            # single line comment
            content = content[:match.start()] + content[match.end():]
            match = comment_re.search(content)


        print content

        # Return json file
        return json.loads(content)

Feel free to use this code. Beerware / WTFPL licence.

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