What is the JSON Standard for an empty string or null variable?

Question

I'm building an application that parses a JSON template and then replaces the values of the objects with new data. My question is what is the standard way to represent empty data in JSON?

This is how I'm handling this right now:

an empty string is represented as ""
an empty int/float/double/bool/etc. is represented as null

Is this correct?

Setting an empty string is like enforcing a default value. So if you do this, you should do it for other types as well, int - asign a 0, bool asign false etc. However, in my opinion "empty data" should equivalent to null. So here you have to think about whether your data should be empty or not present at all, cause you can have undefined checks somewhere as well. — Samuil Petrov
– Samuil Petrov, Commented Aug 25, 2017 at 13:21

Frank · Accepted Answer · 2019-12-05 22:37:49Z

8

It should be pretty straight forward.

{
  "Value1": null, 
  "Value2": null,
}

Null represents a null-able datatype so your business layer needs then to know if that is an int, double, string ...

edited Dec 5, 2019 at 22:37

Frank

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answered Aug 25, 2017 at 13:19

Jester

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Comments

Simone · Accepted Answer · 2017-08-25 13:25:22Z

-2

It is entirely up to you.

The falsy values in JavaScript are:

false
null
undefined
0
NaN
'' or ""

You can use any of these to represent an empty value. However, keep in mind that when you try to access an object's property which doesn't exist, you will get undefined. So undefined can be considered the standard null value, in a way.

Having said that, one convention is to use null so that you can distinguish a property that has been intentionally set to null from a property that is actually undefined.

answered Aug 25, 2017 at 13:25

Simone

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4 Comments

FSMaxB Over a year ago

undefined is not valid JSON, and NaN isn't valid JSON either.

Simone Over a year ago

You're right, however if you pass any of these values to JSON.stringify() you'll always get back a string, which is valid JSON

FSMaxB Over a year ago

but JavaScript was never mentioned.

claudekennilol Jun 25 at 16:44

This answer is not even related to the question. E.g. what If I want to know what json values are considered falsy for jq // operator?

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