JSON

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format. It is easy for humans to read and write. It is easy for machines to parse and generate. It is based on a subset of the JavaScript Programming Language, Standard ECMA-262 3rd Edition - December 1999. JSON is a text format that is completely language independent but uses conventions that are familiar to programmers of the C-family of languages, including C, C++, C#, Java, JavaScript, Perl, Python, and many others. These properties make JSON an ideal data-interchange language. - http://json.org/

JSON is pretty ubiquitous these days in web programming. Most API communication is done using JSON. An example is the JIRA bug tracker from Atlassian software which exposes it's data via API calls in JSON format. Another example is the MediaWiki API, which also uses JSON as the communication format for it's API.

Notes about working with JSON

There's this code for reading/writing/validating JSON which is used by the Composer project.

When working with large JSON data sets, it's helpful to have a viewer like http://jsonviewer.stack.hu/ which easily parses and renders the object in a tree fashion. PHP code for formatting JSON to make it "readable" aka "pretty print" is now built-in, as of PHP 5.4, with json_decode JSON_PRETTY_PRINT

There are other tools too for working with json

Python python -m json.tool myFile.json
Node based https://github.com/ddopson/underscore-cli
Binary C https://stedolan.github.io/jq/ (with online viewer)