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Description

The JSON format reads and outputs data in the JSON format. The JSON format returns the following: The JSON type is compatible with JavaScript. To ensure this, some characters are additionally escaped:
  • the slash / is escaped as \/
  • alternative line breaks U+2028 and U+2029, which break some browsers, are escaped as \uXXXX.
  • ASCII control characters are escaped: backspace, form feed, line feed, carriage return, and horizontal tab are replaced with \b, \f, \n, \r, \t , as well as the remaining bytes in the 00-1F range using \uXXXX sequences.
  • Invalid UTF-8 sequences are changed to the replacement character � so the output text will consist of valid UTF-8 sequences.
For compatibility with JavaScript, Int64 and UInt64 integers are enclosed in double quotes by default. To remove the quotes, you can set the configuration parameter output_format_json_quote_64bit_integers to 0. ClickHouse supports NULL, which is displayed as null in the JSON output. To enable +nan, -nan, +inf, -inf values in output, set the output_format_json_quote_denormals to 1.

Example usage

Example:

Format settings

For JSON input format, if setting input_format_json_validate_types_from_metadata is set to 1, the types from metadata in input data will be compared with the types of the corresponding columns from the table.

See also

Last modified on July 24, 2026