json_writer: new routines to create JSON data

Add "struct json_writer" and a series of jw_ routines to compose JSON
data into a string buffer.  The resulting string may then be printed by
commands wanting to support a JSON-like output format.

The json_writer is limited to correctly formatting structured data for
output.  It does not attempt to build an object model of the JSON data.

We say "JSON-like" because we do not enforce the Unicode (usually UTF-8)
requirement on string fields.  Internally, Git does not necessarily have
Unicode/UTF-8 data for most fields, so it is currently unclear the best
way to enforce that requirement.  For example, on Linux pathnames can
contain arbitrary 8-bit character data, so a command like "status" would
not know how to encode the reported pathnames.  We may want to revisit
this (or double encode such strings) in the future.

Helped-by: Eric Sunshine <sunshine@sunshineco.com>
Helped-by: René Scharfe <l.s.r@web.de>
Helped-by: Wink Saville <wink@saville.com>
Helped-by: Ramsay Jones <ramsay@ramsayjones.plus.com>
Signed-off-by: Jeff Hostetler <jeffhost@microsoft.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Makefile b/Makefile
index 1d27f36365..5a781e29f1 100644
--- a/Makefile
+++ b/Makefile
@@ -709,6 +709,7 @@ TEST_BUILTINS_OBJS += test-example-decorate.o
 TEST_BUILTINS_OBJS += test-genrandom.o
 TEST_BUILTINS_OBJS += test-hashmap.o
 TEST_BUILTINS_OBJS += test-index-version.o
+TEST_BUILTINS_OBJS += test-json-writer.o
 TEST_BUILTINS_OBJS += test-lazy-init-name-hash.o
 TEST_BUILTINS_OBJS += test-match-trees.o
 TEST_BUILTINS_OBJS += test-mergesort.o
@@ -871,6 +872,7 @@ LIB_OBJS += hashmap.o
 LIB_OBJS += help.o
 LIB_OBJS += hex.o
 LIB_OBJS += ident.o
+LIB_OBJS += json-writer.o
 LIB_OBJS += kwset.o
 LIB_OBJS += levenshtein.o
 LIB_OBJS += line-log.o