JSON Parsing and Stringifying in jQuery (as a plugin)

jQuery has many kick-ass javascript utilities. Among these is a method (jQuery.getJSON()) that parses JSON that you grab from a remote source and gives it back to you as a JSON object. Excellent!

Surprisingly though, jQuery (as of 1.3, to my knowledge anyway) does not make any functions available to allow you to securely parse a simple text string into JSON. Not sure why this is so, especially since they must do it behind the scenes for the getJSON() method, but so be it.

I needed this functionality, though, so I could pass some data from one of my templates to a jQuery function I’m working on.

Fortunately, even though jQuery doesn’t have built-in functionality for this, it was relatively trivial to wrap the open source JSON parsing and stringifying library published by JSON.org in an easy-to-use jQuery plugin.

So that’s what I did. I changed nothing of the JSON parsing library implementation published by JSON.org; I just wrapped two jQuery methods around it, as follows:

;(function($) {
    if (!this.JSON) {
        var JSON = {};
    }
    /* ... implementation of parse() and stringify() here ... */
    $.toJSON = function(text, reviver) {
        if (typeof reviver == "undefined") {
            reviver = null;
        }
        return JSON.parse(text, reviver);
    };
    $.jSONToString = function(value, replacer, space) {
        if (typeof replacer == "undefined") {
            replacer = null;
        }
        if (typeof space == "undefined") {
            space = null;
        }
        return JSON.stringify(value, replacer, space);
    };

})(jQuery);

Pretty convenient. Now I can securely parse and decode JSON to my heart’s content.

Here’s the source code of the full jQuery JSON plugin, if you’re interested. Note that I have not extensively tested the plugin, but since I did not actually touch any part of the JSON parsing library it’s based on (save for creating a local scope for the JSON variable), I wouldn’t foresee any issues.

Here’s a bit more information about the library the plugin is based on.