[Safety1stClyde]

> And although officially JSON requires quoted strings, almost none of the parsers actually enforce that

What programming language? I'm not familiar with those parsers, the ones I know of very much do enforce quoted strings.

> you will find a huge amount of JSON out there that is not actually compliant with the official spec

The parsers I use all follow the current JSON RFC specification, and I've never encountered any JSON from APIs which they reject.

> Just like browsers have huge hacks in them to handle misformed HTML.

Web browsers do deal with a variety of things, not so much JSON parsers in my experience.

[Macha]

I think the point is that they accept more than the spec dictates - do your JSON parsers accept e.g. the vs code config file (JSON with comments) or JSON with unquoted keys?

[joelellis]

The most commonly used parsers only accept valid JSON - including the one included within most JS runtimes (JSON.stringify/parse). VSCode explicitly uses a `jsonc` parser, the only difference being that it strips comments before it parses the JSON. There's also such thing as `json5`, which has a few extra features inspired by ES5. None of them are unquoted strings. I've never come across anything JSON-like with unquoted strings other than YAML, and everything not entirely compliant with the spec has a different name.

[jokethrowaway]

Can you name a JSON parser which accept comments or unquoted keys?

I've never seen one

[cesarb]

IIRC, Gson accepts unquoted keys.