jQuery Forum

After searching Google for 30 seconds I found that the correct JSON syntax is to double quote the keys.

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4627.txt

It works either way, non-quoted, single quoted and double quoted. It all depends on if you'd like to follow coding standards or write sloppy code.

I don't understand your questioning. JSON is a Javascript object. Well, technically it's a subset of Javascript but eh, we'll just call it a Javascript object to make life easier. Here's all you'll need to read on JSON and should be able to clear up things for you. http://www.json.org/

A JSON object would be something like:

{"menu": {

  "id": "file",
  "value": "File",
  "popup": {
    "menuitem": [
      {"value": "New", "onclick": "CreateNewDoc()"},
      {"value": "Open", "onclick": "OpenDoc()"},
      {"value": "Close", "onclick": "CloseDoc()"}
    ]
  }
},
"menu2": {
  "id": "file2",
  "value": "File2",
  "popup": {
    "menuitem": [
      {"value": "New", "onclick": "CreateNewDoc()"},
      {"value": "Open", "onclick": "OpenDoc()"},
      {"value": "Close", "onclick": "CloseDoc()"}
    ]
  }
}


}

Whereas an object would look like:

var obj = {
  menu1 : {
        "id": "file",
        "value": "File",
        "popup": {
                "menuitem": [
                  {"value": "New", "onclick": "CreateNewDoc()"},
                  {"value": "Open", "onclick": "OpenDoc()"},
                  {"value": "Close", "onclick": "CloseDoc()"}
                ]
        }
 },
  menu2 : {
        "id": "file2",
        "value": "File2",
        "popup": {
                "menuitem": [
                  {"value": "New", "onclick": "CreateNewDoc()"},
                  {"value": "Open", "onclick": "OpenDoc()"},
                  {"value": "Close", "onclick": "CloseDoc()"}
                ]
        }
 } 
      
};

So techincally they are two different JavaScript objects, but thats irrelevant to the question.

To answer your question christophe.humbert some object key/values have to have quotes on them if they already exist as a predefined JavaScript method/property etc, such as "for" and "class" for example.
This is the same for keys that have "-" ("background-color" for example)or "_" in them. 

But for any other case they are optional, but obviously strings much be in quotes.

(Incase you did not know, In the example you gave "location" would be the key and 'top' would be the value )

 Hope that helps you.

he isn't using json, and it doesn't matter whether you use double or single quotes in a javascript object. When creating or setting values in a javascript object, quotes are not required for the keys unless the key contains a special character that would be used for some arithmetic, such as "-","=","(",")",":",".",",", etc.... "_" is not one of these special characters therefor keys with "_" don't have to be quoted unless they contained one of the special characters.

Thanks for these explanations. I thought JSON was a string formatted to look like an object (so it could be sent over http), so obviously I missed something.