JSON5 is a human-friendly JSON extension that aims to alleviate the limitations of standard JSON. It allows for comments, trailing commas, unquoted keys, single-quoted strings, and multi-line strings. This makes JSON5 files more readable and writable without sacrificing machine-parsability. The library provides robust parsing and serialization, enabling developers to seamlessly work with JSON-like data while enjoying enhanced syntax for configuration files and data interchange. It's perfect for scenarios where readability is crucial.
The npm package json5 has had sporadic releases since its initial versions in 2012. Releases were more frequent in 2018, with occasional updates in subsequent years. The most recent releases occurred in December 2022, including versions 2.2.2, 1.0.2, and 2.2.3. There have been no releases in 2023, 2024, or 2025 to date.
Json5's npm package downloads show a generally upward trend from February 2024 to July 2025, peaking in June/July Recent August data is incomplete, showing a dip, but earlier months consistently exceeded 300 million downloads, suggesting strong and growing usage.
