Copyright (c) 2011-2014 Milo Yip (miloyip@gmail.com)

RapidJSON GitHub

RapidJSON Documentation

RapidJSON is a JSON parser and generator for C++. It was inspired by rapidxml.

• RapidJSON is small but complete. It supports both SAX and DOM style API. The SAX parser is only a half thousand lines of code.

• RapidJSON is fast. Its performance can be comparable to strlen(). It also optionally supports SSE2/SSE4.1 for acceleration.

• RapidJSON is self-contained. It does not depend on external libraries such as BOOST. It even does not depend on STL.

• RapidJSON is memory friendly. Each JSON value occupies exactly 16/20 bytes for most 32/64-bit machines (excluding text string). By default it uses a fast memory allocator, and the parser allocates memory compactly during parsing.

• RapidJSON is Unicode friendly. It supports UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32 (LE & BE), and their detection, validation and transcoding internally. For example, you can read a UTF-8 file and let RapidJSON transcode the JSON strings into UTF-16 in the DOM. It also supports surrogates and "\u0000" (null character).

More features can be read here.

JSON(JavaScript Object Notation) is a light-weight data exchange format. RapidJSON should be in fully compliance with RFC4627/ECMA-404. More information about JSON can be obtained at

• Introducing JSON
• RFC4627: The application/json Media Type for JavaScript Object Notation (JSON)
• Standard ECMA-404: The JSON Data Interchange Format

RapidJSON is cross-platform. Some platform/compiler combinations which have been tested are shown as follows.

• Visual C++ 2008/2010/2013 on Windows (32/64-bit)
• GNU C++ 3.8.x on Cygwin
• Clang 3.4 on Mac OS X (32/64-bit) and iOS
• Clang 3.4 on Android NDK

Users can build and run the unit tests on their platform/compiler.

RapidJSON is a header-only C++ library. Just copy the include/rapidjson folder to system or project's include path.

To build the tests and examples:

1. Obtain premake4.
2. Copy premake4 executable to RapidJSON/build (or system path).
3. Run rapidjson/build/premake.bat on Windows, RapidJSON/build/premake.sh on Linux or other platforms.
4. On Windows, build the solution at rapidjson/build/vs2008/ or /vs2010/.
5. On other platforms, run GNU make at rapidjson/build/gmake/ (e.g., make -f test.make config=release32; make -f example.make config=debug32).
6. On success, the executable are generated at rapidjson/bin.

To build the Doxygen documentation:

1. Obtain and install Doxygen.
2. In the top-level directory, run doxygen build/Doxyfile.
3. Browse the generated documentation in doc/html.

This simple example parses a JSON string into a document (DOM), make a simple modification of the DOM, and finally stringify the DOM to a JSON string.

// rapidjson/example/simpledom/simpledom.cpp`
#include "rapidjson/document.h"
#include "rapidjson/writer.h"
#include "rapidjson/stringbuffer.h"
#include <iostream>

using namespace rapidjson;

int main() {
    // 1. Parse a JSON string into DOM.
    const char* json = "{\"project\":\"rapidjson\",\"stars\":10}";
    Document d;
    d.Parse(json);

    // 2. Modify it by DOM.
    Value& s = d["stars"];
    s.SetInt(s.GetInt() + 1);

    // 3. Stringify the DOM
    StringBuffer buffer;
    Writer<StringBuffer> writer(buffer);
    d.Accept(writer);

    // Output {"project":"rapidjson","stars":11}
    std::cout << buffer.GetString() << std::endl;
    return 0;
}

Note that this example did not handle potential errors.

The following diagram shows the process.

More examples are available.