This Objective-C category adds C style comment support to NSJSONSerialization. It allows you to read JSON files with // and /* … */ comments. It is similar to JSONKit's JKParseOptionComments option.

You can use this category's JSONObjectWithCommentedData:options:error: method just like NSJSONSerialization's JSONObjectWithData:options:error::

id object = [NSJSONSerialization JSONObjectWithCommentedData:data options:0 error:&error];

It strips single line and multi-line comments as well as whitespace before it hands over the data to NSJSONSerialization.

The code works directly on UTF-8 data without converting it to an NSString, but also detects UTF-16 and UTF-32 byte order marks (BOM). If a non-UTF-8 BOM is detected, it converts the data to UTF-8. The most efficient encoding to use for parsing is UTF-8.

I've also added the convenience methods JSONObjectWithCommentedContentsOfURL:options:error: and JSONObjectWithCommentedContentsOfFile:options:error: to load JSON directly from a file or url.

Finally stringWithJSONObject:options:error: is a convenience method around dataWithJSONObject:options:error: if you need an NSString instead of NSData.

Have a look at this blog post to read more about the motivation behind NSJSONSerialization+Comments.

If you are including NSJSONSerialization+Comments in a project that has Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) enabled, you will need to set the -fno-objc-arc compiler flag. To do this in Xcode, go to your active target and select the "Build Phases" tab and open the "Compile Sources" section. In the "Compiler Flags" column, set -fno-objc-arc for NSJSONSerialization+Comments.m.

Code in this repository is licensed under the MIT license (see the LICENSE file).