How to modify a JSON file using Python without losing comments in the file

Question

I have a settings.json file full with useful comments (sometimes C-style and sometimes Python), and I'm programmatically modifying them with eg json library, but when I save the modified one I lose all the comments explaining the fields. Another inconvenience is losing the indentations and spacing therein.

Is there a 'neat' way of modifying the file programmatically?

Answer 1

Standard json files cannot possibly have comments and still be compliant json.

There is another format that was designed to overcome this problem: json5 . It has libraries designed to keep json5 properties like comments intact - you can python library for it here .