Trying to iterate over a string with repeated section should throw an error (JavaScript version) about json-template HOT 7 OPEN

This is basically a case where the error handling could be stricter rather than
silently trying to iterate over a string.

The behavior you describe as expected isn't what's intended, see:
http://code.google.com/p/json-template/wiki/Reference

The .or section is only expanded if the section is empty or missing -- not if 
it has
an item which isn't a list.

So I think we should just raise EvaluationError in case the node for a repeated
section isn't a list.

Ah, I interpreted the reference document slightly different and assumed the .or
section to be also executed if the intended target (a list) was not there. 
Perhaps
that was just wishful thinking.

The use case for this is automatically generated JSON from an XML source. I 
often get
the following XML:
  <list>
    <item>one</item>
    <item>two</item>
  </list>

The generated JSON then becomes:
  {list: {item: ['one', 'two'] }}

Unfortunately, when the list has only one element, the resulting JSON is:
  {list: {item: 'one'}}

I don't have much control (or rather, I don't want to) over the way the JSON is
generated as it is done automatically by an XSLT stylesheet from an XML source. 
I was
hoping to catch this case in the template.

I see.  Yeah it's unforunate that you have that type of output and don't have 
control
over it.

But there are a lot of issues you can get with arbitrary JSON, and the general
solution is to modify the data dictionary (automatically).  I just checked in a
Python example of this, in python/jsontemplate/datadict*.py.

It should be simple to do a similar thing from JavaScript for your case, 
although
possibly issue 22 is relevant too.

b.l.stein, what did you end up doing? I have the same issue; my JSON is 
converted from XML, so sometimes a 
value is an array of strings, sometimes it is a string.

I was thinking about converting certain strings to an array of a string (a 
singleton) manually, but it's not the 
nicest solution ...

I ended up writing formatter functions for some of my problem cases and 
rewriting the
JSON in other cases (with a simple recursive function.)