JavaScript Object Notation - the internet’s favorite data storage solution.
JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is a lightweight, tree-structured data storage format with support for lists of key-value pairs (aka ”maps”), arrays, and infinite nesting. It’s the de facto data storage and transmission standard of the internet. It’s widely used and most modern development languages handle JSON natively.
Benefits over .CSV
- Parsing errors are very infrequent
- Parsing is handled natively in many programming languages
- You can represent much more diverse data with a much higher density when compared to .CSV
Drawbacks Compared to .CSV
- JSON takes some level of learning to “pick up”. It’s not as simple as relational data.
- Cannot just open a .JSON file in Excel
- Keys take up more bytes than do commas
Limitations
- You cannot have an object that contains a reference to itself