Harriet Bazley <[email protected]> wrote:
> ... a file of what looks like JavaScript variables
>({"model":{"values":[{"title":"UK 1","selected":false,"disabled":false,
>etc.) with a source URL ending in "&_jsoff=1"
You may know this already: this is a string in "JSON" format. It's used to
"serialise" or "flatten" one or more simple or hierarchical / structured
variables into one long string of characters which can be sent somewhere and
then parsed to recreate that set of variables. It's a bit more complicated
than just a series of name/value pairs.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON
and: http://www.json.org/
There's a useful utility at: http://amfview.org which lets you upload a file
(or provide the URL of one), containing AMF3 or JSON or XML data, & then it
will display the contained data in either plain text or as an expandable/
collapsable tree structure.
(I found this website when trying to make sense of the data.dat files that
are downloaded as part of BBC iPlayer file sets; they contain AMF3 which has
a similar prpose to JSON but is quite a lot more complicated, containing
binary flags describing data attributes and allowing elimination of
duplicate substrings from what gets transmitted). AMF3 is an Adobe data
format used by Flash applications.)
--
Jeremy C B Nicoll - my opinions are my own.
