Elixir JSON

This library provides a natively implemented JSON encoder and decoder for Elixir.

All contributions are welcome.

Before you install

When dealing with smaller file.json ~ 14KB payloads, JSON v1 handles the processing consistently performant, with a much smaller deviation, and absolutely no real-world absolute performance differences with Jason.

However, with often unusually large file.json > 5MB payloads, and if the processing speed for those payloads is paramount to you (ie, processing them in a real-time manner vs using them in migration scripts or whatever), JSON v1 currently significantly slower when compared to Jason.

Small payload (~ 30KB) benchmark results for JSON v1 and Jason

As you can see below, both libraries handle "regular" small json payloads beautifully.

JSON.decode calls while usually being a bit slower than their Jason counterparts, they are more consistently performant, with a much smaller deviation.

So I would actually advise using JSON.decode and JSON.encode for smaller payloads.

For JSON.encode vs Jason.encode, the difference is so minimal, it's not worth arguing about.

Large payload (~ 8MB) benchmark results for JSON v1 and Jason

However, with often unusually large file.json > 5MB payloads, and if the processing speed for those payloads is paramount to you (ie, processing them in a real-time manner vs using them in migration scripts or whatever), then JSON v1 would not be the best choice when compared to Jason.

Plan of action for Elixir JSON v2

I am currently working on a solution for this problem in JSON v2. You can follow the process here: https://github.com/cblage/elixir-json/pull/52

Interim Solution

To processes these large payloads adding the Jason lib to your dependencies (without hopefully removing JSON for the smaller payloads 😅):

• Jason@Hex.pm: http://hex.pm/packages/jason
• Jason@GitHub: https://github.com/michalmuskala/jason

After installing Jason, you then use JSON.decode and JSON.encode for small your small 30KB range json payloads due to the reasons mentioned above.

While Elixir JSON v2 is not ready to processs the bigger >5MB json payloads in time-sensitive operations, you go for Jason.decode and Jason.encode.

Thanks for the comprehension, Carlos Brito Lage

Example

 [
   {:cowboy, "~> 1.0.0"},
   {:plug, "~> 1.0"},
   {:json, "~> 1.2"},
   {:jason, "~> 1.0"},
 ]

You can find its documentation here: https://hexdocs.pm/jason/readme.html

Installing

Simply add {:json, "~> 1.2"} to your project's mix.exs file, in the dependencies list and run mix deps.get json.

Example for a project that already uses Plug:

[
  {:cowboy, "~> 1.0.0"},
  {:plug, "~> 1.0"},
  {:json, "~> 1.2"},
]

Usage

Encoding an Elixir type

  @doc "
	JSON encode an Elixir list
  "	
  list = [key: "this will be a value"]
  is_list(list)
  # true
  list[:key]
  # "this will be a value"
  {status, result} = JSON.encode(list)
  # {:ok, "{\"key\":\"this will be a value\"}"}
  String.length(result)
  # 41

Decoding a list from a string that contains JSON

  @doc "
	JSON decode a string into an Elixir list
  "
  json_input = "{\"key\":\"this will be a value\"}"
  {status, list} = JSON.decode(json_input)
	{:ok, %{"key" => "this will be a value"}}
  list[:key]
  # nil
  list["key"]
  # "this will be a value"

At any time, you can turn on verbose logging for this library only. To do so, head to config file of your application and add below lines:

use Mix.Config

config :logger, level: :debug

config :json, log_level: :debug

Note that, changing only :logger level to :info, :warn or :error will silent :json too.

License

The Elixir JSON library is available under the BSD 3-Clause aka "BSD New" license