Creating JSON arrays in Boost using Property Trees

Question

I'm trying to create a JSON array using boost property trees.

The documentation says: "JSON arrays are mapped to nodes. Each element is a child node with an empty name."

So I'd like to create a property tree with empty names, then call write_json(...) to get the array out. However, the documentation doesn't tell me how to create unnamed child nodes. I tried ptree.add_child("", value), but this yields:

Assertion `!p.empty() && "Empty path not allowed for put_child."' failed

The documentation doesn't seem to address this point, at least not in any way I can figure out. Can anyone help?

Answer 1

What you need to do is this piece of fun. This is from memory, but something like this works for me.

boost::property_tree::ptree root;
boost::property_tree::ptree child1;
boost::property_tree::ptree child2;

// .. fill in children here with what you want
// ...

ptree.push_back( std::make_pair("", child1 ) );
ptree.push_back( std::make_pair("", child1 ) );

But watch out there's several bugs in the json parsing and writing. Several of which I've submitted bug reports for - with no response :(

EDIT: to address concern about it serializing incorrectly as {"":"","":""}

This only happens when the array is the root element. The boost ptree writer treats all root elements as objects - never arrays or values. This is caused by the following line in boost/propert_tree/detail/json_parser_writer.hpp

else if (indent > 0 && pt.count(Str()) == pt.size())

Getting rid of the "indent > 0 &&" will allow it to write arrays correctly.

If you don't like how much space is produced you can use the patch I've provided here

Answer 2

When starting to use Property Tree to represent a JSON structure I encountered similar problems which I did not resolve. Also note that from the documentation, the property tree does not fully support type information:

JSON values are mapped to nodes containing the value. However, all type information is lost; numbers, as well as the literals "null", "true" and "false" are simply mapped to their string form.

After learning this, I switched to the more complete JSON implementation JSON Spirit. This library uses Boost Spirit for the JSON grammar implementation and fully supports JSON including arrays.

I suggest you use an alternative C++ JSON implementation. See the Stack Overflow question What’s the best C++ JSON parser? for some alternatives to JSON Spirit.