On Tue, 2012-01-10 at 13:11 +0100, Gergely Nagy wrote:
Following this mail, a couple of patches will come - they were written in last November, but I don't think I posted them (as I didn't expect to see the json-parser merged so soon). Until now, they were sitting on my feature/3.4/json/parser branch, and that's where they sit now, too.
I rebased that branch onto 3.4 master + center.c syntax error fixes (which I posted a week or two ago), and am sending the json parser patches now.
They accomplish a few things: it makes the parser handle invalid JSON input properly (by returning an error, instead of crashing); adds support for parsing boolean, array and nested object types.
Booleans will get parsed into TRUE or FALSE, nested objects will be turned into dotted notation (which also means that keys with a dot in them won't be handled properly by format-json, once it is updated to support reconstructing nested objects from dotted notation), and arrays will be treated like nested objects, with the array indexes used as a key.
As an example, lets look at a JSON input:
{"is-example": true, "hats": ["top hat", "baseball cap", "pointy witch-hat"], "auth": { "method": ["looking angry at the security guy", "bribery"], "result": "did not work" } }
This would be parsed into the following name-value paris:
"is-example"="TRUE" "hats.0"="top hat" "hats.1"="baseball cap" "hats.2"="pointy witch-hat" "auth.method.0"="looking angry at the security guy" "auth.method.1"="bribery" "auth.result"="did not work"
The other part of this will be an enhahcement to value-pairs and format-json, that will make syslog-ng able to reconstruct the original JSON (more or less... booleans probably won't be supported, except perhaps optionally with a flag). But that is something I haven't started working on yet.
Merged all of this, however it'd be nice if format-json could actually handle the output of this parser. Thanks Gergely. -- Bazsi