Well, JSON in XML will need to have quotes escaped... I can think of two ways to make this less painful:

• use PHP serialization instead of JSON when generating XML. This only needs a small code change, since EntityHandler already supports PHP serialization. That sucks for portability, though - people want to process the dumps with Java, Python, etc.

• use CDATA to wrap the JSON, instead of quoting. Nice and easy, the question is just: how does the exporter know when to do this? Or should we always use CDATA? But this may confuse tools that use regular expressions to process dumps, instead of properly parsing XML. But then, I guess such code is broken by design.

So... other ideas?

What if we replace the " in the JSON with '?

SO, no, ' cannot be used instead of ". Stupid JSON spec.

PHP serialization: Denny says no.

CDATA is yucky too, but I am afraid this is the best way probably. :(

Anyone other ideas? Otherwise, we could go for CDATA.

A side problem is that the unicode character don't need to be escaped per JSON spec so

the bit could be rewrited in

<text xml:space="preserve"
bytes="8538">{&quot;label&quot;:{&quot;en&quot;:&quot;Barack
Obama&quot;,&quot;fr&quot;:&quot;Barack
Obama&quot;,&quot;ar&quot;:&quot;باراك
أوباما&quot;,&quot;ru&quot;:&quot;Барак
Обама&quot;,&quot;nb&quot;:&quot;Barack
Obama&quot;,&quot;it&quot;:&quot;Barack Obama&quot;,&quot;de&quot;:&quot;Barack
Obama&quot;,&quot;be-tarask&quot;:&quot;Барак
Абама&quot;,&quot;nan&quot;:&quot;Barack
Obama&quot;,&quot;ca&quot;:&quot;Barack
Obama&quot;},&quot;description&quot;:{&quot;en&quot;:&quot;President of the
United States of America

which is 1.2 smaller in byte

but the big win is ofcourse CDATA escaping

<text xml:space="preserve"
bytes="8538"><CDATA[[{"label":{"en":"Barack
Obama","fr":"Barack
Obama","ar":"باراك
أوباما","ru":"Барак
Обама","nb":"Barack
Obama","it":"Barack Obama","de":"Barack
Obama","be-tarask":"Барак
Абама","nan":"Barack
Obama","ca":"Barack
Obama"},"description":{"en":"President of the
United States of America

which is twice smaller

if CDATA way is chosen one should take care transforming ]]> sequences in ]]]]><CDATA[[> as explained here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/223652/is-there-a-way-to-escape-a-cdata-end-token-in-xml

A possibility to embed JSON is YAML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YAML but the tools for parsing it is less widespread

We should compare the compressed size of the current encoding with the CDATA encoding to see if this actually makes a significant difference. If yes, we should indeed start using CDATA in XML exports. Otherwise, I don't think it 's worth the trouble.