pmjson -q does not work

[myllynen]

As the title says:

$ echo foo | pmjson -q
$ echo $?
0

[natoscott]

@myllynen the parser we're using is fairly relaxed in the JSON it accepts - its treating "foo" as a valid token here (a key named "foo" with no value). We can enable a stricter parsing mode, but even that is still fairly laid back and tries to accept a wide range of input (including not-strictly-valid JSON strings as you found).

You'll find structurally broken input to be caught, however - things like "}foo" and so on. If someone were to make the (upstream) embedded parser we're using more strict I'm happy to incorporate that, but we're not likely to do that ourselves I guess.

All that said, I did find at least one bug in pmjson -q/--quiet mode (still reporting parse errors to stderr) - will push that shortly.

[natoscott]

@myllynen I take back my earlier "we're not likely to do that ourselves" comment - we've begun switching over to an alternate JSON parsing implementation, and I've confirmed the cases you've reported are correctly reported as errors. There is now just one place left in the code base using the old code - and it is the code sitting behind pmjson(1) :)

So I agree we should fix this issue - I'll add it to the roadmap and hack on it when I get a chance. I'd also like to introduce a couple of small pmjson(1) features beyond stricter syntax checking (JSON pointer support and perhaps coloured console output for improving the PCP REST API documentation).