Format of compressed JSON

Hi dhj,

Our compressed JSON uses a non-standard variation of base64 encoded gzip'ed JSON. Your question is timely as you may have noticed that our forum compressed patch now reports the version number of the patch. It does this by decoding, decompressing, and searching through the JSON.

We aren't going to put a lot of efforts into supporting this code, but I include for your reference and experimentation the relevant code excerpts from our forum web page (view source).

  

var codeGZ64 = $(this).text();
var togglename = this.id.replace("pastedcode", "toggle");
var patchout = '-----------end_max5_patcher-----------';
// we need to cut out the begin and end patcher text
// however, since the base64 encoding of JUCE puts on an additional
// number and "." at the beginning AND we need to cut this off, we
// will search here for the first period and not the 'begin_max5_patcher' text
var inpos = codeGZ64.indexOf(".");
var outpos = codeGZ64.search(patchout);
codeGZ64 = codeGZ64.slice( inpos+1, outpos);
try {
    // the b64 decode algo inside of JXG will try to clean up the string, removing
    // all white chars and other chars that are not part of our codex.
    var code = JXG.decompress( codeGZ64 );
    // let's check the code to see if it contains any max6 objs
    // we will also check for any patcher objs with version info
    // if so, lets update the patcher text
    var obj = JSON.parse(code);
    var max_version = getMaxVersion(obj);
    $("#" + togglename + " #maxversion" ).text(max_version);
    // uncomment to see the JSON above the gzip'ed code
    //$(this).text( code + "n" + codeGZ64);

} catch (err) {
    //alert("could not decompress pasted Max patch code. Error: " + err);
    $("#" + togglename + " #maxversion" ).text("5");
}

We have a variety of ideas of what this opens to the door to, including what you mention for previewing patchers, searching patchers, data-mining for auto-tagging, etc. We have no commitments to what or when any additional forum patcher features might be coming, so I would encourage you to have fun with this stuff.

Keep in mind after this, you're basically on your own, but I think it should give you enough to get access to the uncompressed JSON within a browser.

Cheers,
Joshua