TL;DR

A little one-liner to encode a string for JSON.

A few days ago I wanted to fit a CSS string inside a JSON object, as a string.

Needless to say, it didn’t go well: strings in JSON cannot contain newlines, so they have to be turned into the corresponding escape sequence (\n in this specific case).

As it often (well… almost always) happens, I reached out for Perl to help me:

perl -MJSON::PP -pe '$x.=$_}{$_=encode_json([$x]);s/^\[|\]$//g' style.css

I’m really happy that the JSON::PP module is in CORE, because JSON is pretty much ubiquitous and having the possibility to handle it quickly is really helpful.

The one-liner might be a bit cryptical, so it deserves an explanation. For example, what’s with that }{ in the middle?!?

It’s actually a trick made possible by the -p command-line option, which wraps what you write in the following while loop (more or less):

while (<>) {
    ... what you write in your one-liner here...
    print STDOUT $_;
}

So, in our case, the code that is parsed is actually the following:

while (<>) {
    $x.=$_
}
{
    $_=encode_json([$x]);
    s/^\[|\]$//g;
    print STDOUT $_;
}

Now it’s easier to see what’s going on:

• the while loop accumulates all input lines into package variable $x;
• after the loop, $x is encoded thanks to JSON::PP and the encoded string is put in $_. The encoding requires to receive either an array reference or a hash reference, i.e. it does not work directly with a string, so we embed the $x inside an anonymous array;
• the embedding in the array added two square brackets around our JSON string, so the substitution takes care to remove them;
• eventually, we print out $_.

If you’re wondering, the }{ trick has a name: it’s called the butterfly operator, not much because it’s an operator (it’s not), but because it seems an operator and it resembles… a butterfly 😄

Stay safe and happy May 1^st!