What is the data storage format JSON?

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a text-based data interchange format that is easily readable by humans and simple for machines to analyze.

Main features:

Lightweight: Less syntactic noise compared to XML.
Supports structure: Allows representing both simple values and complex objects and arrays.
Language-independent: Used in many programming languages.
Parsing: There are standard and third-party libraries for parsing JSON into various data structures.
Prevalence: Widely used in web services, APIs, and configuration files.

Main data types in JSON:

Object: A collection of key-value pairs. The key is a string, and the value can be any of the allowed JSON data types.
```
{
  "name": "Ivan",
  "age": 30,
  "married": false
}
```
Array: An ordered list of values. Values can be any of the allowed JSON data types.
```
[
  "apple",
  "banana",
  "orange"
]
```
Standard values:
- String: A sequence of characters in double quotes. Supports escape characters.
```
"hello world"
```
- Number: Integer and decimal numbers.
```
42
3.14
```
- Boolean: true or false.
```
true
```
- Null: Represents the absence of a value.
```
null
```

The JSON format is based on two structures: object (corresponds to an associative array, dictionary, hash table) and array (corresponds to a list, vector, sequence).