How to parse JSON string containing "NaN" in Node.js

Question

Have a node.js app that is receiving JSON data strings that contain the literal NaN, like

 "[1, 2, 3, NaN, 5, 6]"

This crashes JSON.parse(...) in Node.js. I'd like to parse it, if i can into an object.

I know NaN is not part of JSON spec. Most SO links (sending NaN in json) suggest to fix the output.

Here, though the data is produced in a server I don't control, it's by a commercial Java library where I can see the source code. And it's produced by Google's Gson library:

private Gson gson = (new GsonBuilder().serializeSpecialFloatingPointValues().create()); 
... 
gson.toJson(data[i], Vector.class, jsonOut)

So that seems like a legitimate source. And according to the Gson API Javadoc it says I should be able to parse it:

Section 2.4 of JSON specification disallows special double values (NaN, Infinity, -Infinity). However, Javascript specification (see section 4.3.20, 4.3.22, 4.3.23) allows these values as valid Javascript values. Moreover, most JavaScript engines will accept these special values in JSON without problem. So, at a practical level, it makes sense to accept these values as valid JSON even though JSON specification disallows them.

Despite that, this fails in both Node.js and Chrome: JSON.parse('[1,2,3,NaN,"5"]')

Is there a flag to set in JSON.parse()? Or an alternative parser that accepts NaN as a literal?

I've been Googling for a while but can't seem to find a doc on this issue.

PHP: How to encode infinity or NaN numbers to JSON?

Answer 1

Have a node.js app that is receiving JSON data strings that contain the literal NaN, like

Then your NodeJS app isn't receiving JSON, it's receiving text that's vaguely JSON-like. NaN is not a valid JSON token.

Three options:

1. Get the source to correctly produce JSON

This is obviously the preferred course. The data is not JSON, that should be fixed, which would fix your problem.

2. Tolerate the NaN in a simple-minded way:

You could replace it with null before parsing it, e.g.:

var result = JSON.parse(yourString.replace(/\bNaN\b/g, "null"));

...and then handle nulls in the result. But that's very simple-minded, it doesn't allow for the possibility that the characters NaN might appear in a string somewhere.

Alternately, spinning Matt Ball's reviver idea (now deleted), you could change it to a special string (like "***NaN***") and then use a reviver to replace that with the real NaN:

var result = JSON.parse(yourString.replace(/\bNaN\b/g, '"***NaN***"'), function(key, value) {
    return value === "***NaN***" ? NaN : value;
});

...but that has the same issue of being a bit simple-minded, assuming the characters NaN never appear in an appropriate place.

3. Use (shudder!) eval

If you know and trust the source of this data and there's NO possibility of it being tampered with in transit, then you could use eval to parse it instead of JSON.parse. Since eval allows full JavaScript syntax, including NaN, that works. Hopefully I made the caveat bold enough for people to understand that I would only recommend this in a very, very, very tiny percentage of situations. But again, remember eval allows arbitrary execution of code, so if there's any possibility of the string having been tampered with, don't use it.

Answer 2

When you deal with about anything mathematical or with industry data, NaN is terribly convenient (and often infinities too are). And it's an industry standard since IEEE754.

That's obviously why some libraries, notably GSON, let you include them in the JSON they produce, losing standard purity and gaining sanity.

Revival and regex solutions aren't reliably usable in a real project when you exchange complex dynamic objects.

And eval has problems too, one of them being the fact it's prone to crash on IE when the JSON string is big, another one being security risks.

That's why I wrote a specific parser (used in production) : JSON.parseMore