Json in Assembly Language

Our first program will demonstrate JSON encoding and decoding in Assembly Language. Here’s the full source code and explanation:

section .data
    ; Define JSON strings
    json_true db "true", 0
    json_int db "42", 0
    json_float db "3.14", 0
    json_string db '"hello"', 0
    json_array db '["apple","banana","cherry"]', 0
    json_object db '{"name":"John","age":30}', 0

    ; Format strings for printing
    fmt_str db "%s", 10, 0

section .text
    global main
    extern printf

main:
    ; Print JSON representations
    push json_true
    push fmt_str
    call printf
    add esp, 8

    push json_int
    push fmt_str
    call printf
    add esp, 8

    push json_float
    push fmt_str
    call printf
    add esp, 8

    push json_string
    push fmt_str
    call printf
    add esp, 8

    push json_array
    push fmt_str
    call printf
    add esp, 8

    push json_object
    push fmt_str
    call printf
    add esp, 8

    ; Exit the program
    mov eax, 1
    xor ebx, ebx
    int 0x80

This Assembly Language program demonstrates basic JSON encoding by defining JSON-formatted strings for different data types and printing them.

In Assembly, we don’t have built-in JSON libraries like in high-level languages. Instead, we’re manually creating JSON-formatted strings and printing them.

To run the program, you would typically assemble it into an object file, link it, and then execute the resulting binary:

$ nasm -f elf json_example.asm
$ ld -m elf_i386 -o json_example json_example.o
$ ./json_example
true
42
3.14
"hello"
["apple","banana","cherry"]
{"name":"John","age":30}

This example shows basic JSON representation, but it doesn’t include actual encoding or decoding. In Assembly, implementing full JSON parsing would be a complex task requiring significant low-level string manipulation.

For more advanced JSON operations in Assembly, you would typically use external C libraries and interface with them, or implement the JSON parsing logic manually, which would involve tokenizing the input, parsing the structure, and handling different data types.

Remember that Assembly Language is a low-level language, and tasks like JSON parsing that are simple in high-level languages can be quite complex and verbose in Assembly. In practice, JSON operations in Assembly are rare, and such tasks are usually handled by higher-level languages or specialized libraries.