rxi/json.lua

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

2186 stars · 375 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

A tiny, pure-Lua JSON encoding and decoding library that works with Lua 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, and LuaJIT. It is a single ~280-line file with no dependencies, offering fast performance and clear error messages.

Use cases

• encode Lua tables to JSON strings
• decode JSON strings into Lua tables
• parse JSON API responses in a Lua project
• serialize game or app config data as JSON
• drop-in JSON support for LuaJIT or Lua 5.1-5.3

When to choose

• you need a dependency-free, single-file JSON library in pure Lua
• you need compatibility across Lua 5.1 through 5.3 and LuaJIT
• performance of pure-Lua JSON encoding/decoding matters
• you want clear error messages with line and column info

When to avoid

• you need pretty-printed JSON output
• you need to preserve JSON null values inside arrays or objects
• you need a C-speed JSON parser for very high throughput
• you need support for sparse arrays or mixed key types without errors

Facets

library · maturity stable

serialization parser developer-tools web-development apis lua cross-platform pure-lua -encoder -decoder lightweight single-file

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="rxi/json.lua")