CToon.jl

Julia binding for ctoon, via direct ccall into the C core — the same approach the Rust and Zig bindings take.

Installation

CToon.jl lives inside the main ctoon monorepo, under src/bindings/julia/, alongside every other language's binding. It isn't registered in Julia's General registry yet, so install it straight from GitHub with subdir — the standard Pkg mechanism for installing one package out of several that live in one git repo:

import Pkg
Pkg.add(url="https://github.com/mohammadraziei/ctoon.git", subdir="src/bindings/julia")

That's it — Pkg.add runs deps/build.jl for you automatically as part of the install (it compiles ctoon.c plus a small C shim into a shared library; no separate C library install, no BinaryBuilder/JLL step, just a C compiler on the build host).

using CToon
CToon.parse("{\"a\": [1, 2, true]}")
# OrderedDict{String, Any}("a" => Any[1, 2, true])

CToon.dumps(Dict("a" => 1, "b" => [1, 2, 3]))
# "a: 1\nb[3]: 1,2,3"

Developing against a local checkout

Working on the binding itself, from inside a clone of the ctoon repo:

cd src/bindings/julia
julia deps/build.jl
julia --project=. -e 'using Pkg; Pkg.instantiate(); include("test/runtests.jl")'

Pkg.develop(path="src/bindings/julia") also works from any other project's environment, if you want to iterate on the binding while using it from elsewhere.

Scope

parse / parse_toon — JSON and TOON reading respectively, into native OrderedDict{String,Any} / Vector{Any} / String / Int64/UInt64/Float64 / Bool / nothing. OrderedDict specifically (not Base.Dict) so that a parse → dumps/to_json round trip preserves key order.
dumps / to_json — the reverse: any of those same native shapes, encoded as TOON or JSON text.

API Reference

CToon.dumps — Method

CToon.dumps(value) -> String

Encode a native Julia value (as CToon.parse would produce: AbstractDict, Vector, AbstractString, Bool, Integer, AbstractFloat, or nothing) as TOON text.

source

CToon.parse — Method

CToon.parse(str::AbstractString) -> Any

Parse str (TOON/JSON per ctoon's reader) and return it as native Julia data: OrderedDict{String,Any} for objects (order-preserving — see _to_julia's own comment), Vector{Any} for arrays, String, Int64/Float64, Bool, or nothing.

source

CToon.parse_toon — Method

CToon.parse_toon(str::AbstractString) -> Any

Parse str as TOON (not JSON – see CToon.parse for that) and return it as native Julia data, same value shapes as CToon.parse.

source

CToon.spec_date — Method

CToon.spec_date() -> String

The release date of the targeted spec, e.g. "2026-07-26".

source

CToon.spec_tag — Method

CToon.spec_tag() -> String

The toon-format/spec git tag this build targets, e.g. "v4.1.2".

source

CToon.spec_version — Method

CToon.spec_version() -> String

The TOON spec version this build targets, e.g. "4.1" (spec §13), from the C core.

source

CToon.to_json — Method

CToon.to_json(value) -> String

Encode a native Julia value the same way CToon.dumps does, but as JSON text instead of TOON.

source