Multiline String in Tree mode

[sergiojoker11]

Just went through the options and I could not see any for "supporting" multiline JSON string. (Yes, I am aware there is no such a thing in JSON spec however, I believe a JSON editor could make the experience less techy) Is there trick I can do to make the experience of writing a multiline string a bit more pleasant? The idea is that when editing JSON string newlines are interpreted as such then under the hood the actual JSON being edited contains the \n and \t for tabs and so on.

[josdejong]

Thanks for your suggestion Sergio. The editor indeed simply shows characters like return and tab as \n and \t, as "raw", escaped characters (especially \t is tricky in a browser). For unicode characters we do have an option to render them escaped or not. In some cases you would like to see the escaped contents to have full control, in others you would like to see the interpreted contents, requiring a more advanced text editor. Or maybe a color highlighted HTML editor. Or a fancy date picker.

I think a good solution would be to allow rendering the values you want yourself, this is proposed here: #738

Besides that we could think though whether it would make sense to have a mode "raw text contents" vs "interpreted text contents", where in the latter case \n and \r etc is rendered as a new line and a tab character.

Related discussion: #185

[wilfreds]

How about a optional feature to just ignore the special characters and not trying to escape them as /n. I know CR and LF is not allowed in JSON but I have found that in most cases the entity that consumes the JSON will handle it just fine.

[josdejong]

Just "ignoring" it will not work: if you have a string like hello \n world, and render it in a browser, whitespace characters like \n are simply not rendered, you have to replace them with <br/> for example. See the earlier mentioned discussion: https://github.com/josdejong/jsoneditor/issues/185#issuecomment-99768848

[wilfreds]

Thanks Jos. I have a web admin tool that lets the user edit raw json. But for some of the fields to be more human readable they need to be multiline. In fact some of the fields are SQL like sentences. Today I use for that. And that works absolutely fine. <textarea> alows newline and stores them as ASCII characters 13 and 10. And the JSON consumer at the other end does not mind. But editing JSON with no colors or visual validations is not pleasant. So I'm looking for a solution for that.

[josdejong]

Using textarea would indeed be much simpler. I've tried this long time ago, at that time I could not make that a success because you can't scale a textarea to automatically fit its contents (instead of having a fixed size and scrollbars). So I ended up using editable DIV's instead.

Would the proposal in #738 be helpful for you @wilfreds? That would allow you to render certain values with a textarea instead of the default.

[wilfreds]

@josdejong Yes, I think that would work for me.

[josdejong]

👍

[wilfreds]

Great. Let me know when it's possible to test this.

[josdejong]

Sure! Beware though that the issue has been open for a long time though, will not be addressed overnight I expect.