How to prevent JSON unicode escaping

[NCrashed]

Hi, I've found that unicode strings are forced to be escaped in toPrettyString method (also at any json to string conversion), example:

{
    "id": null,
    "result": [
        {
            "test_field": [
                "\u041A\u0443\u0441\u043E\u043A \u0442\u0435\u043A\u0441\u0442\u0430"
            ]
        }
    ],
    "jsonrpc": "2.0"
}

Is there is any way to control the behavior? It is getting hard to analyze response for huge JSONs (generally for frontend developers).

[s-ludwig]

In fact I disabled Unicode output escaping for the std_data_json candidate. @etcimon, do you think that doing so would do any harm in practice, based on what you experienced so far? I would at least make it the default to pass Unicode as-is. For the std.data.json module, this could be made a configuration option, but in case of vibe.d I'd rather keep the interface fixed before it gets deprecated and removed.

[etcimon]

Two ways to do it would be an ensure_ascii like in python, or a special UTF wrappper function around the output string for when it's necessary to have it "pretty". I can't really know if it would cause problems to have forced ascii off by default because it depends on remote peer engine, but playing it safe would be to leave it on as a document-specific setting. I've never seen a website using plain UTF-8 characters but I can see why it would be preferable for debugging.

[s-ludwig]

I've never seen a website using plain UTF-8 characters but I can see why it would be preferable for debugging.

I don't see why it would ever not be preferable. After all JSON is defined to be UTF encoded, so this just seems to be done for some kind of legacy support in existing libraries. I had hoped that the time of 7-bit bytes was over, though.

Since this change was introduced recently without any preceding complaints, I'm leaning towards just disabling it for vibe.d and to keep it as an option in std.data.json.

[etcimon]

Since this change was introduced recently without any preceding complaints, I'm leaning towards just disabling it for vibe.d and to keep it as an option in std.data.json.

So it would be preferable to disable it by default if there is a simple legacy wrapper than outputs legacy ASCII from a UTF json string. After giving it some thought, I don't see any issue with sending UTF strings by default whereas being unable to decode UTF-8/UTF-16 from ASCII strings was obviously a necessity.

[NCrashed]

Thanks a lot for fast response!

I've never seen a website using plain UTF-8 characters but I can see why it would be preferable for debugging.

Although any browser understands escaped characters most of Russian websites are sent with plain UTF-8 (escaped char is 6 byte long and plain is only 2 bytes long).