JSONencoded

JSONencoded refers to data that has been serialized into the JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) text format for storage or transmission. JSON is a lightweight, language-agnostic data interchange standard that represents objects as key‑value mappings, arrays, strings, numbers, booleans, and null. The format was designed in the early 2000s by Douglas Crockford and was standardized later in RFC 8259.

JSON text is encoded in Unicode and typically transmitted as UTF-8. Strings use double quotes and support escape sequences such as \n, \", \\, and the six Unicode escapes. JSON forbids comments in its canonical form and requires proper nesting of objects and arrays.

Encoding and decoding are performed by language‑specific libraries. Common functions include serialization (toJSON or dumps) and parsing (fromJSON or loads). JSONencoded data maps to native types in each language, but dates, binaries, and functions are not explicit in JSON; dates are usually strings or timestamps, and binary data may be encoded as base64.

Limitations include numeric precision for large integers, lack of a separate binary type, and the absence of guaranteed key order in some implementations. JSON is a text format, so it can be larger than binary encodings, though whitespace can be stripped to reduce size. It also does not support circular references directly, and trailing commas are invalid.

Interoperability is aided by standardization: RFC 8259 defines JSON syntax and semantics, and the common MIME type is application/json. Many ecosystems support streaming variants such as JSON Lines (NDJSON) for large or continuous data.

An example of JSONencoded data: {"name":"Alice","active":true,"scores":[95,88,76]}.

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