json multiple keys with same value?

Question

need to store in json different keys with same value, like this:

{
  "key1" : "valueA",
  "key2" : "valueA",
  "key3" : "valueA",
  "key4" : "valueB",
  "key5" : "valueB",
  "key6" : "valueB",
}

But because there will be many keys associated with the same value, is there an option to optimize the code, e.g. using an array for the keys? This was throwing me errors...

{
  ["key1","key2","key3"] : "valueA",
  ["key4","key5","key6"] : "valueB
}

Jordan Running · Accepted Answer · 2014-12-03 17:08:28Z

11

Nope. In JSON all keys must be strings. The best you could do is:

{
  "key1,key2,key3": "valueA",
  "key4,key5,key6": "valueB"
}

(Or some other delimiter in place of ,.)

But then, of course, you'll need to do some processing after decoding the JSON to split them back up into multiple keys.

However, if your concern is with the cost of sending the data over HTTP, then just make sure your server has gzip compression enabled. It will do a great job of compressing those repeated values.

answered Dec 3, 2014 at 17:08

Jordan Running

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1 Comment

Dac0d3r Over a year ago

I've looked at YAML and XML to see if they could solve the problem, they can't, but do you know if there is any good solution when you need to have multiple keys pointing to the same value (so you can lookup a value by eg. url or by id without having to split up a string etc - I'm looking for a solution which would perform somewhat similar to looking up a property by the key, so it'd scale well above 10000+ entries?

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