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JSON

This is a very well defined data format, though unlike XML does not
provide for a URL pointer to semantic specificaion of the data contents
and its schema.

It is what FireFox uses for its data storage.

The web page http://www.json.org/ fully defines the tokenization of the
language.

However it is a white space seperated language, which means that it is
typically compressed so only one white space character is used as a data type
seperator making a file typically one very long line!

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Quick reformater...
  echo '{"foo": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum"}' | python -mjson.tool

On older version of python use
  python -c'from simplejson.tool import main; main()'

In perl, using the JSON module (not present by default)
  echo '{"foo": "lorem", "bar": "ipsum"}' |
    perl -0007 -MJSON -nE'say to_json(
                 from_json($_, {allow_nonref=>1}), {pretty=>1})'

Or use jshon  (c program)  from http://kmkeen.com/jshon/
which is designed to make json useful from shell scripts.
and pretty prints by default.

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