YojsonBasic

YojsonBasic refers to the basic JSON interface provided by the OCaml library Yojson. It is one of the two primary interfaces in the Yojson package, the other being Yojson.Safe. The Basic module offers a straightforward, efficient way to work with JSON data in OCaml, including parsing, constructing, and rendering JSON values.

The core concept in YojsonBasic is a JSON value type that represents the standard JSON data model. Values include null, booleans, numbers, strings, arrays, and objects. In this module, arrays are represented as lists of JSON values and objects as association lists of string keys to JSON values. This representation is designed to be convenient for OCaml programming and easy to pattern-match against.

Key functionality provided by YojsonBasic includes parsing JSON from strings or input channels and converting JSON values back to strings or written output. The module emphasizes a fast, predictable API suitable for typical JSON I/O tasks, as well as integration with OCaml’s type system. When parsing may fail, the library reports errors with informative messages to aid debugging.

For practical use, YojsonBasic includes helper utilities that facilitate converting between JSON values and standard OCaml types. The Yojson.Basic.Util module offers functions to extract common OCaml types from JSON values and to construct JSON values from OCaml data. This makes it convenient to encode and decode data structures common in OCaml applications.

YojsonBasic is part of the Yojson package, commonly installed via package managers such as OPAM. It is widely used in the OCaml ecosystem for interfacing with web services, configuration files, and data interchange, standing as a core, neutral option for JSON handling in OCaml projects.