JSON literals

This section shows that the literal for both a jsonb value and a json value, as these are used both in SQL statements and in PL/pgSQL code, is the enquoted and appropriately typecast RFC 7159-compliant text value that represents the JSON value.

The mutual relationship between a JSON value and its ::text typecast is an instance of the general rule that governs the mutual relationship between a value of any data type and its ::text typecast. This general rule is explained in the section The text typecast of a value, the literal for that value, and how they are related.

This DO block follows, for jsonb, the same pattern that is used in that section for a variety of different data types. See also the section ::jsonb and ::json and ::text (typecast).

create type t as (f1 int, f2 text, f3 boolean, f4 text[]);

do $body$
declare
  v1 constant int     := 42;
  v2 constant text    := 'a';
  v3 constant boolean := true;
  v4 constant text[]  := array['x', 'y', 'z'];

  v5 constant t := (v1, v2, v3, v4);

  original   constant jsonb  not null := to_jsonb(v5);
  text_cast  constant text   not null := original::text;
  recreated  constant jsonb  not null := text_cast::jsonb;
begin
  assert
    (recreated = original),
  'assert failed';
  raise info 'jsonb: %', text_cast;
end;
$body$;

See the account of the to_jsonb() function. The DO block produces this output (after manually stripping the "INFO:" prompt):

jsonb: {"f1": 42, "f2": "a", "f3": true, "f4": ["x", "y", "z"]}

It shows that the "non-lossy round trip rule" holds here too:

jsonb value to text typecast and back to jsonb value

And it shows that the ::text typecast of a jsonb value that has been constructed bottom-up from SQL values conforms to RFC 7159.

The next block follows the same pattern for json. However, the ASSERT must be written differently because the = operator has no overload for json.

do $body$
declare
  v1 constant int     := 42;
  v2 constant text    := 'a';
  v3 constant boolean := true;
  v4 constant text[]  := array['x', 'y', 'z'];

  v5 constant t := (v1, v2, v3, v4);

  original   constant json  not null := to_json(v5)::jsonb;
  text_cast  constant text  not null := original::text;
  recreated  constant json  not null := text_cast::json;
begin
  assert
    (recreated::jsonb = original::jsonb),
  'assert failed';
  raise info 'json: %', text_cast;
end;
$body$;

The output is the same as the DO block for jsonb produces. It shows that the same "non-lossy round trip" rule holds for a json value too.

Recall (see the Synopsis section) that a json value is stored as a text value, annotated with the fact of what the data type is, and that whitespace in such a value is semantically insignificant. (The jsonb data type stores a parsed representation of the document hierarchy of subvalues in an appropriate internal format.) This has no effect on the reliability of the "non-lossy round trip" rule. However, it means that a round trip json value to jsonb value to json value might be lossy because, unless the json value happens to use whitespace just as the ::text typecast of a jsonb value does, the recreated json value will have different whitespace from the original json value.