To paraphrase an old advertisement, "libjson users would rather fight than switch."
At least I assume you must like fighting with the library. Using nlohmann's JSON library, you could use code like this:
nlohmann::json j {
{ "author-details", {
{ "name", "Joys of Programming" },
{ "Number of Posts", 10 }
}
}
};
At least to me, this seems somewhat simpler and more readable.
Parsing is about equally straightforward. For example, let's assume we had a file named somefile.json that contained the JSON data shown above. To read and parse it, we could do something like this:
nlohmann::json j;
std::ifstream in("somefile.json");
in >> j; // Read the file and parse it into a json object
// Let's start by retrieving and printing the name.
std::cout << j["author-details"]["name"];
Or, let's assume we found a post, so we want to increment the count of posts. This is one place that things get...less tasteful--we can't increment the value as directly as we'd like; we have to obtain the value, add one, then assign the result (like we would in lesser languages that lack ++):
j["author-details"]["Number of Posts"] = j["author-details"]["Number of Posts"] + 1;
Then we want to write out the result. If we want it "dense" (e.g., we're going to transmit it over a network for some other machine to read it) we can just use <<:
somestream << j;
On the other hand, we might want to pretty-print it so a person can read it more easily. The library respects the width we set with setw, so to have it print out indented with 4-column tab stops, we can do:
somestream << std::setw(4) << j;