Encoding symbol keys in JSON?

[Isiah Meadows]

I honestly wouldn't worry about this edge case - it's rare you actually
would want to serialize symbols, and it's usually best handled at the
application level, not the framework level.

On Mon, Nov 13, 2017, 06:10 Alex Vincent <ajvincent at gmail.com> wrote:

> In modern ECMAScript, objects can have symbols for property names instead
> of strings.  This leads me to a problem in my es7-membrane project:  how do
> I translate those symbol keys into JSON for a reusable file?  (I partially
> answer my own question below.)
>
> Consider the following code:
>
>   const X = {};
>   const two = Symbol("two");
>   Reflect.defineProperty(X, "one", {value: 1, writable: true, enumerable:
> true, configurable: true});
>   Reflect.defineProperty(X, two,   {value: 2, writable: true, enumerable:
> true, configurable: true});
>   return JSON.stringify(Reflect.ownKeys(X));
>
> In both Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, this returns ["one", null].  I
> suppose this is part of the ECMAScript's latest standard. I do see
> JSON.stringify has a "replacer" callback argument, and JSON.parse has a
> "reviver" argument.  I presume that these are here to solve
> encoding/decoding problems with JSON.  This may be the route I take...
>
> At first, serializing shouldn't be a problem:  if I hit a symbol as a key,
> I could use the replacer functionality to deliver a standard
> JSON-serializable object.
>
> But what if the ordering of keys is not guaranteed?  I'm referring
> specifically to the case of a developer modifying X's properties in the
> above snippet - say, by defining Symbol("three") as a key before the two
> key.  Or worse, by defining a different Symbol("two") before the existing
> two key?  I am not referring to the case of the developer modifying the
> results from Result.ownKeys().
>
> Now, all of a sudden, this little stringify problem has possibly morphed
> into a diff/merge problem:  between yesterday's serialized JSON for ownKeys
> and today's, someone has cleverly inserted a symbol where there was another
> in the list of keys.  My code is supposed to infer today from yesterday's
> generated JSON which property key belongs to which property value.  With
> symbols - especially identically-keyed symbols - I could lose that
> consistency if I'm not careful.
>
> (Side note:  for es7-membrane, I faced a similar but easily solvable
> problem, where Reflect.ownKeys(function() {}) returned different results in
> different browsers - especially when the function passed into ownKeys had
> additional properties.  In that case all the properties were strings, so I
> just extracted the common set of string-named properties and put them at
> the front of the keys list for consistency.)
>
> I'm looking for advice - including the very real possibility that I'm
> overthinking this or worrying too much about an edge case.
>
> --
> "The first step in confirming there is a bug in someone else's work is
> confirming there are no bugs in your own."
> -- Alexander J. Vincent, June 30, 2001
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>
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