JSURL is an alternative to JSON + URL encoding (or JSON + base64 encoding). It makes it handy to pass complex values via URL query parameters.

JSURL has been designed to be:

• Compact: its output is much more compact than JSON + URL encoding (except in pathological cases). It is even often slightly more compact than regular JSON!
• Readable: its output is much more readable than JSON + URL encoding.
• Foolproof: its output only contains characters that are unaffected by URL encoding/decoding. There is no risk of missing a URL encoding/decoding pass, or of messing up a JSURL string by applying an extra URL encoding or decoding pass.
• Easy to generate and parse

Think of it as JSON with the following changes:

• Curly braces ({ and }) replaced by parentheses (( and ))
• Square brackets ([ and ]) replaced by (~ and )
• Property names unquoted (but escaped -- see below).
• String values prefixed by a single quote (') and escaped
• All other JSON punctuation (colon : and comma ,) replaced by tildes (~)
• An extra tilde (~) at the very beginning.

Property names and string values are escaped as follows:

• Letters, digits, underscore (_), hyphen (-) and dot (.) are preserved.
• Dollar sign ($) is replaced by exclamation mark (!)
• Other characters with UNICODE value <= 0xff are encoded as *XX
• Characters with UNICODE value > 0xff are encoded as **XXXX

JSON:

{"name":"John Doe","age":42,"children":["Mary","Bill"]}

JSON + URL encoding:

%7B%22name%22%3A%22John%20Doe%22%2C%22age%22%3A42%2C%22children%22%3A%5B%22Mary%22%2C%22Bill%22%5D%7D

JSURL:

~(name~'John*20Doe~age~42~children~(~'Mary~'Bill))

var JSURL = require("jsurl");

str = JSURL.stringify(obj);
obj = JSURL.parse(str);

// return def instead of throwing on error
obj = JSURL.tryParse(str[, def]);

The easiest way to install jsurl is with NPM:

npm install jsurl

This work is licensed under the MIT license.