This tip will definitely help some of you out.

When creating JSON-formatted data, it seems as if you can omit quoting the keys:

{ name: "Anthony", reading: "The Wisdom Of Crowds" }

…although technically this is not JSON, as the key values are not quoted. However, you’ll see lots of examples floating around that use the non-key-quoting system. And it works in a lot of cases.

However, I ran into this code in Douglas Crockford’s JSON library for Javascript that was failing:

if (/^[\],:{}\s]*$/.test(text.replace(/\\./g, '@').
replace(/"[^"\\\n\r]*"|true|false|null|-?\d+(?:\.\d*)?(?:[eE][+\-]?\d+)?/g, ']').
replace(/(?:^|:|,)(?:\s*\[)+/g, ''))) { /* ... */ }

Ha! Ha! Ha! Figuring out the error in this code is sort of like figuring out what smells in a landfill. But, it was easier than I thought. What was happening was that the string I was sending in to parse to JSON did not have the keys wrapped in double quotes, so the Crockford script failed, thinking it was not a valid JSON string.

Morals:

1. Firebug is your friend.
2. Type safety is your friend.
3. Generic “syntax error” exceptions are not your friend, particularly when you’re chaining four calls together in one line.