Perl `JSON::XS` can produce un-canonical JSON

Sometimes you want to produce a canonical version of a data structure in JSON - with keys sorted and no additional whitespace. JSON::XS promises us that we can achieve such result with a canonical option. It only notes that canonicalization doesn’t work for tied hashes. But I’ve just spent half a day debugging to learn that this is a bit more complicated.

To my complete surprise the following script fails most of the time:

use Data::Printer;
use JSON::XS;
use Test::More (tests => 1);
my $data = { date => "2018-03-13", prev_period  => "2018-03-12", profile => "Desktop"};
my $pre = JSON::XS->new->utf8->canonical(1)->encode($data);
p $data;
my $post = JSON::XS->new->utf8->canonical(1)->encode($data);
is $post, $pre;

Turns out this is a problem known for 3 years with both Data::Printer and JSON::XS - both unfixed, except for a fork at Cpanel-JSON-XS.

The thing is that even when you aren’t using Data::Printer, somebody can still break your canonical JSON representation.

I think I’ll just switch to Cpanel::JSON::XS, there is too much drama about hash key randomization in JSON::XS.