what is the purpose of using square brackets in json?

json square-bracket
Uswer721 picture Uswer721 · Apr 18, 2016 · Viewed 65.3k times · Source

I am new to json. Some json examples i have seen have data within the curly braces and some json examples have subdata within square brackets.

{
"glossary": {
    "title": "example glossary",
    "GlossDiv": {
        "title": "S",
        "GlossList": {
            "GlossEntry": {
                "ID": "SGML",
                "SortAs": "SGML",
                "GlossTerm": "Standard Generalized Markup Language",
                "Acronym": "SGML",
                "Abbrev": "ISO 8879:1986",
                "GlossDef": {
                    "para": "A meta-markup language, used to create markup languages such as DocBook.",
                    "GlossSeeAlso": ["GML", "XML"]
                },
                "GlossSee": "markup"
            }
        }
    }
}
}

From http://json.org/example.html

What is the need/purpose of having data within the square brackets?

regards

Answer

Boy picture Boy · Apr 18, 2016

The square brackets produce a list/array.

The curly brackets produce an object with key/value pairs.

The list can then be a value of a key/value pair.

Related questions

How do I POST JSON data with cURL?

I use Ubuntu and installed cURL on it. I want to test my Spring REST application with cURL. I wrote my POST code at the Java side. However, I want to test it with cURL. I am trying to post …

Read More
What is the correct JSON content type?

I've been messing around with JSON for some time, just pushing it out as text and it hasn't hurt anybody (that I know of), but I'd like to start doing things properly. I have seen so many purported "standards" for …

Read More
Why can't Python parse this JSON data?

I have this JSON in a file: { "maps": [ { "id": "blabla", "iscategorical": "0" }, { "id": "blabla", "iscategorical": "0" } ], "masks": [ "id": "valore" ], "om_points": "value", "parameters": [ "id": "valore" ] } I wrote this script to print all of the JSON data: import json from pprint import pprint …

Read More