* Support UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32 encodings, including little endian and big endian.
* These encodings are used in input/output streams and in-memory representation.
* Support automatic detection of encodings in input stream.
* Support transcoding between encodings internally.
* For example, you can read a UTF-8 file and let RapidJSON transcode the JSON strings into UTF-16 in the DOM.
* Support encoding validation internally.
* For example, you can read a UTF-8 file, and let RapidJSON check whether all JSON strings are valid UTF-8 byte sequence.
* Support custom character types.
* By default the character types are `char` for UTF8, `wchar_t` for UTF16, `uint32_t` for UTF32.
* Support custom encodings.
## API styles
* SAX (Simple API for XML) style API
* Similar to [SAX](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_API_for_XML), RapidJSON provides a event sequential access parser API (`rapidjson::GenericReader`). It also provides a generator API (`rapidjson::Writer`) which consumes the same set of events.
* DOM (Document Object Model) style API
* Similar to [DOM](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_Object_Model) for HTML/XML, RapidJSON can parse JSON into a DOM representation (`rapidjson::GenericDocument`), for easy manipulation, and finally stringify back to JSON if needed.
* The DOM style API (`rapidjson::GenericDocument`) is actually implemented with SAX style API (`rapidjson::GenericReader`). SAX is faster but sometimes DOM is easier. Users can pick their choices according to scenarios.
## Parsing
* Recursive (default) and iterative parser
* Recursive parser is faster but prone to stack overflow in extreme cases.
* Iterative parser use custom stack to keep parsing state.
* Support *in situ* parsing.
* Parse JSON string values in-place at the source JSON, and then the DOM points to addresses of those strings.
* Faster than convention parsing: no allocation for strings, no copy (if string does not contain escapes), cache-friendly.
* Support 32-bit/64-bit signed/unsigned integer and `double` for JSON number type.
* Support parsing multiple JSONs in input stream (`kParseStopWhenDoneFlag`).
* Error Handling
* Support comprehensive error code if parsing failed.
* Support error message localization.
## DOM (Document)
* RapidJSON checks range of numerical values for conversions.
* Optimization for string literal
* Only store pointer instead of copying
* Optimization for "short" strings
* Store short string in `Value` internally without additional allocation.
* For UTF-8 string: maximum 11 characters in 32-bit, 21 characters in 64-bit (13 characters in x86-64).
* Optionally support `std::string` (define `RAPIDJSON_HAS_STDSTRING=1`)
## Generation
* Support `rapidjson::PrettyWriter` for adding newlines and indentations.
## Stream
* Support `rapidjson::GenericStringBuffer` for storing the output JSON as string.
* Support `rapidjson::FileReadStream` and `rapidjson::FileWriteStream` for input/output `FILE` object.
* Support custom streams.
## Memory
* Minimize memory overheads for DOM.
* Each JSON value occupies exactly 16/20 bytes for most 32/64-bit machines (excluding text string).
* Support fast default allocator.
* A stack-based allocator (allocate sequentially, prohibit to free individual allocations, suitable for parsing).
* User can provide a pre-allocated buffer. (Possible to parse a number of JSONs without any CRT allocation)