Structural Characters and Literals

The Internet Object format includes several structural characters and literals that are used to structure and delimit data within a document. These characters are used in conjunction with objects, strings, arrays, numbers, and whitespace to create complex and flexible data structures.

Structural Characters

Structural characters are used to define the structure of the data within an Internet Object document. The following are the structural characters used in the Internet Object format.

Symbol	Characters	Unicode	Description
,	Comma	U+002C	Separator between values
~	Tilde	U+007E	Record delimiter in collection
:	Colon	U+003A	Key-value separator
[	Open Square Bracket	U+005B	Start of array
]	Close Square Bracket	U+005D	End of array
{	Open Curly Bracket	U+007B	Start of object
}	Close Curly Bracket	U+007D	End of object
---	Hyphens	U+002D	Header and data separator
#	Hash	U+0023	Comment start
"	Double Quote	U+0022	String delimiter
'	Single Quote	U+0027	String delimiter
@	At Symbol	U+0040	Starts the raw string

Literals

Literals are specific values that can be used within an Internet Object document. The following are the literals used in the Internet Object format.

Literals	Represents
T	Boolean value True (short)
true	Boolean value True
F	Boolean value False (short)
false	Boolean value False
Inf	Number value Infinity
NaN	Number value Not a Number
N	Null value (short)
null	Null value

Other Special Characters

Special characters are used in conjunction with structural characters and literals to provide additional functionality or context within an Internet Object document. The following are the special characters used in the Internet Object format.

Symbol	Characters	Unicode	Application
?	Question Mark	U+003F	Shortcut for declaring optional member when suffexed to the key name in object schema
*	Asterisk	U+002A	Shortcut for declaring nullable member when suffexed to the key name in object schema. Also used to make schema accept undeclared variables.
-	Hyphen / Minus	U+002D	Represents negative value
+	Plus	U+002B	Represents positive value
$	Doller	U+0024	Denotes a variable