When I see someone asking questions about how to piece together a data representation that looks almost like JSON, I start wondering if perhaps this person actually does want JSON and just doesn't realize that's what it's called.

This happened recently when someone was asking how to decode a string that looked almost like JSON. Turned out it started out as JSON but in his attempt to mold it into a Perlish structure, he had stripped away parts of the JSON syntax/punctuation. So the question may have been about how to turn Y (his format) into Z (Perl), but the actual problem he was taking on was how to turn X (json) into Z (Perl data structure).