JSON Community

Create a Universally-Readable Dictionary

05 Jun 2013

You ever need to create a dictionary?

Of course you do! Heck, I do it all the time!

Oh, stop looking at me like that. I don’t just mean language dictionaries! Address books, blogrolls, bibliographies, calendar events grouped by date… anywhere you have a list of words/phrases/terms/names/etc. and their corresponding definitions/explanations/details/etc., you’ve got a dictionary.

For example, suppose you wanted to create a list of tourist attractions in your favorite city:

Cerro San Cristóbal: A really big hill on the north side of town.
La Vega:             Awesome place to buy veggies.
Patio Bellavista:    Great nightlife and dining.

I’m going to go ahead and take the liberty of assuming that your favorite city is Santiago de Chile, but if this is completely unacceptable to you, feel free to follow along with your own list.

Not too shabby. Now, let’s tweak it a little bit by putting everything in quotes:

"Cerro San Cristóbal": "A really big hill on the north side of Santiago."
"La Vega":             "Awesome place to buy veggies."
"Patio Bellavista":    "Great nightlife and dining."

And just so that it’s clear where each entry in the list ends, we’ll add a comma at the end:

"Cerro San Cristóbal": "A really big hill on the north side of Santiago.",
"La Vega":             "Awesome place to buy veggies.",
"Patio Bellavista":    "Great nightlife and dining."

And for good measure, let’s decorate it with some curly braces because they’re just so goshdarned pretty:

{
  "Cerro San Cristóbal": "A really big hill on the north side of Santiago.",
  "La Vega":             "Awesome place to buy veggies.",
  "Patio Bellavista":    "Great nightlife and dining."
}

Well, would you look at that — we now have ourselves a properly-formatted JSON object! Not only is it still perfectly readable by humans, but you can now feed it into a script in just about any language.

And since most JSON readers don’t mind a little whitespace, you can make it even prettier:

{
  "Cerro San Cristóbal":
    "A really big hill on the north side of Santiago.",

  "La Vega":
    "Awesome place to buy veggies.",

  "Patio Bellavista":
    "Great nightlife and dining."
}

With a little bit of JSON, you can easily create attractive definition lists that are readable both by humans and computers!

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