JSON conversion to single quotes

Question

The JSON standard uses double quotes for key names and string values, such as the following:

{"one":1,"two":"two"}

However, the current project I am working on requires JSON-encoded objects to use single quotes instead of double quotes. (In this case {'one':1,'two':'two'}). Right now, there is no reasonable way to get rid of this requirement. I am using the following code to convert a JSON-encoded string from double quotes to single quotes:

var encoded = JSON.stringify(...);
encoded = encoded.replace(/\\"/g, '"')
    .replace(/([\{|:|,])(?:[\s]*)(")/g, "$1'")
    .replace(/(?:[\s]*)(?:")([\}|,|:])/g, "'$1")
    .replace(/([^\{|:|,])(?:')([^\}|,|:])/g, "$1\\'$2");

This code replaces double quotes with single quotes on key names and string values, and handles possible quote escaping issues (such as {"\"key\"": "'value'"}, which is replaced with {'"key"', '\'value\''}).

Is this code enough to guarantee that, for any given object, a valid JSON-like string with single quotes will be generated? In other words, is there any way to break this code such that the result is not valid?

P.S: if you are interested, the reason that JSON strings must have single quotes is that I am working with Cassandra's map type, which doesn't accept double quotes.

Answer 1

No, that code is not enough to handle any valid JSON.

Here are two examples where the result is not only different from the expected, but also unparsable:

The string:

{"hello":"wor\":ld"}

will be converted to:

{'hello':'wor':ld'}

The string:

{"hello":"w''orld"}

will be converted to:

{'hello':'w\''orld'}

Answer 2

Disclaimer: I post this answer for reference purposes only, and note that it contains my own work. In other words, this is a form of self-advertisement for the sole sake of helping anyone who is looking for a similar solution.

The new solution I developed is based on bestiejs's JSON 3, an can be found here. It essentially is a complete implementation of a JSON-like encoder/decoder that differs from the official specification in that it uses single quotes for keys and values instead of double quotes.

Generating a CQL-compilant serialized object can be done as following:

cassandraMAP.stringify({...});

This solution passes both tests posted by Guffa (and all of the ECMAScript 5 Conformance tests modified to be compliant for single-quoted literals, along with a bunch of other tests).