TSON is a less rigid form of JSON to make it as easy for humans to type as possible. It makes a great data storage format for any type of data that humans will edit. It supports:

• Comments using the simplest comment convention around; the # symbol
• All strings can be left unquoted, provided they don't contain the characters ",:[]{}
• Real newlines and tabs in strings are perfectly OK.
• If your string needs any of the 7 reserved TSON characters, or is empty, just put double quotes around it ("...")
• In addition, double quoted string can use all of the JSON control sequences.

See the TSON Specification page for more details.

This project contains the source code for that page plus reference implementations.

The C# library contains simple, efficient and cononical tokenizer and parser and utility classes for TSON. It is expected that you will use your existing JSON, JSV or XML serialization/DOM functionality from one of the excellent available libraries, for example:

• JSON.NET
• ServiceStack.Text
• LINQ to XML

As of build 1.0.11105.1 TsonLibrary now provides object serialization and deserialization. See below for details.

To use this class, include the TsonLibrary project from NuGet and add:

using TsonLibrary;

The class contains the following methods:

Validate that the passed in TSON string is valid.

Format the passed in string using the standard TSON conventions.

Convert the passed in TSON to compact JSON.

Convert the passed in TSON to JSV (which is whitespace sensitive).

Convert the passed in TSON to XML.

Parse the passed in TSON into a strongly type TsonTypedObjectNode object tree.

Parse the passed in TSON into a loosely typed TsonObjectNode object tree.

The serialization classes take a slightly different approach to other C# serialization classes. Here are the design goals:

• TSON based file formats should be able to be defined using POCO's; no special schema syntax

• There should be support for both strongly typed and loosely typed fields, e.g. a field could be an arbitrary TSON object, or it could be a specific one with required fields.

• All fields should be TsonNode derived, so that they can retain references to the TsonToken that created them. In this way error messages can point to exact locations in the TSON data.

• Extra fields present in the data should be ignored.

To create a TSON serializable C# class you must derive the class from TsonTypedObjectNode. Then create a public property for each field in object using one of:

• TsonObjectNode
• TsonArrayNode
• TsonArrayNode<T> where T is any of these types
• TsonStringNode
• TsonNumberNode
• TsonBooleanNode
• TsonNullNode
• ... or a TsonTypedObjectNode derived class

Here is an example:

class Data : TsonTypedObjectNode
{
    [TsonNotNull]
    public TsonNumberNode NumNode { get; set; }
    [TsonNotNull]
    public TsonStringNode StringNode { get; set; }
    [TsonNotNull]
    public TsonBooleanNode BoolNode { get; set; }
    [TsonNotNull]
    public TsonObjectNode ObjectNode { get; set; }
    [TsonNotNull]
    public TsonArrayNode ArrayNode { get; set; }
    public CustomData CustomData { get; set; }
    public TsonArrayNode<TsonStringNode> StringNodeList { get; set; }
    public TsonArrayNode<TsonNumberNode> NumberNodeList { get; set; }
    public TsonArrayNode<CustomData> CustomDataList { get; set; }
    public TsonArrayNode<TsonObjectNode> ObjectNodeList { get; set; }
}

class CustomData : TsonTypedObjectNode
{
    public TsonStringNode Thing1 { get; set; }
    public TsonNumberNode Thing2 { get; set; }
}

Given the TSON data in the file data.tson:

NumNode: 10,
StringNode: abc,
BoolNode: true,
ObjectNode: { a: 1, b: 2 },
ArrayNode: [ 1, 2 ],
CustomData: { Thing1: a, Thing2: 2 },
StringNodeList: [ a, b, c ],
NumberNodeList: [ 1, 2, 3 ],
CustomDataList: [ { Thing1: a, Thing2: 1 }, { Thing1: b, Thing2: 2 } ]

You could read and validate this data using just the code:

Tson.ToObjectNode<Data>(File.ReadAllText("data.tson"))

If a TsonFormatException or TsonParseException is generated, it will indicate where in the file the error occurs.

Note the use of the attribute TsonNotNull to indicate fields that must be present in the data.