Complex JSON nesting of objects and arrays

Question

I am having difficultly with syntax and structure of JSON objects/arrays.

{ 
  \"accounting\" : [   
                     { \"firstName\" : \"John\",  
              


        

Answer 1

Make sure you follow the language definition for JSON. In your second example, the section:

"labs":[{
    ""
}]

Is invalid since an object must be composed of zero or more key-value pairs "a" : "b", where "b" may be any valid value. Some parsers may automatically interpret { "" } to be { "" : null }, but this is not a clearly defined case.

Also, you are using a nested array of objects [{}] quite a bit. I would only do this if:

1. There is no good "identifier" string for each object in the array.
2. There is some clear reason for having an array over a key-value for that entry.