Python: parsing JSON-like Javascript data structures (w/ consecutive commas)

Question

I would like to parse JSON-like strings. Their lone difference with normal JSON is the presence of contiguous commas in arrays. When there are two such commas, it i

Answer 1

It's a hackish way of doing it, but one solution is to simply do some string modification on the JSON-ish data to get it in line before parsing it.

import re
import json

not_quite_json = '["foo",,,"bar",[1,,3,4]]'
not_json = True
while not_json:
    not_quite_json, not_json = re.subn(r',\s*,', ', null, ', not_quite_json)

Which leaves us with:

'["foo", null, null, "bar",[1, null, 3,4]]'

We can then do:

json.loads(not_quite_json)

Giving us:

['foo', None, None, 'bar', [1, None, 3, 4]]

Note that it's not as simple as a replace, as the replacement also inserts commas that can need replacing. Given this, you have to loop through until no more replacements can be made. Here I have used a simple regex to do the job.