AppleScript JSON encoder

AppleScript lacks a native way to generate JSON, which makes getting data out of scripts difficult. This script provides a basic JSON encoding capability, to serialize strings, integers, lists and dictionaries.

Installation

Build the json.scpt file by running make, copy it next to your script, and import it with the following code:

tell application "Finder"
    set json_path to file "json.scpt" of folder of (path to me)
end
set json to load script (json_path as alias)

Alternatively, just copy/paste the contens of json.applescript into your own script, and use it straigt away.

Usage

To encode strings, numbers and lists:

json's encode("hellø world")
-- "hell\u00f8 world"

json's encode(13)
-- 13

json's encode({1, "2", {3, 4}})
-- [1, "2", [3, 4]]

Dictionaries are supported via a wrapper object:

set my_dict to json's createDict()
my_dict's setkv("hello", {"world", 13})
json's encode(my_dict)
-- {"hello": ["world", 13]}

set my_dict_2 to json's createDictWith({ {"foo", "bar"}, {"baz", 22} })
json's encode(my_dict_2)
-- {"foo": "bar", "baz": 22}

And also natively (which gives a small performance penalty):

json's encode({glossary:¬
		{GlossDiv:¬
			{GlossList:¬
				{GlossEntry:¬
					{GlossDef:¬
						{GlossSeeAlso:¬
							["GML", "XML"], para:"A meta-markup language, used to create markup languages such as DocBook."} ¬
							, GlossSee:"markup", Acronym:"SGML", GlossTerm:"Standard Generalized Markup Language", Abbrev:"ISO 8879:1986", SortAs:"SGML", id:¬
						"SGML"} ¬
						}, title:"S"} ¬
				, title:"example glossary"} ¬
			})

Decoding is also available (dictionaries with keys which contain spaces are not supported):

set dict to {foo:"bar"}
json's decode(json's encode(dict)) -- {foo: "bar"}