Appendix C. JSON Pointer

Appendix C. JSON Pointer

This appendix is informative.

In relation to JSON Pointer [RFC6901], JSONPath is not intended as a replacement but as a more powerful companion. The purposes of the two standards are different.

JSON Pointer is for identifying a single value within a JSON value whose structure is known.

JSONPath can identify a single value within a JSON value, for example, by using a Normalized Path. But JSONPath is also a query syntax that can be used to search for and extract multiple values from JSON values whose structure is known only in a general way.

A Normalized JSONPath can be converted into a JSON Pointer by converting the syntax, without knowledge of any JSON value. The inverse is not generally true, i.e., a numeric reference token (path component) in a JSON Pointer may identify a member value of an object or an element of an array. For conversion to a JSONPath query, knowledge of the structure of the JSON value is needed to distinguish these cases.