Throw when JSON Patch remove's target path resolves through a primitive or null parent (#5496)

RFC 6902 (section 4.2) requires the target location of a "remove"
operation to exist. operation_remove handled parent.is_object() and
parent.is_array(), but had no final else branch: when the resolved
parent was a primitive value or null, neither branch matched and the
operation silently did nothing instead of failing.

Add the missing else branch, throwing out_of_range.413 with wording
that matches the existing out_of_range.411 thrown by the analogous
"add" case (operation_add) for the same kind of invalid parent.

Fixes #5396.

Signed-off-by: Niels Lohmann <mail@nlohmann.me>
This commit is contained in:
Niels Lohmann
2026-09-09 09:49:12 +02:00
committed by GitHub
parent d6660cf718
commit c9477ccf91
6 changed files with 89 additions and 0 deletions
+14
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@@ -933,6 +933,20 @@ BSON stores the length of documents, arrays, strings, and binary values in a sig
[`to_bson`](../api/basic_json/to_bson.md) produced documents with negative length prefixes that
[`from_bson`](../api/basic_json/from_bson.md) rejected.
### json.exception.out_of_range.413
A JSON Patch `remove` operation cannot be applied because the target location's parent is neither an object nor an array. Per [RFC 6902](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc6902), a `remove` target must reference a member of an existing object or an element of an existing array; a primitive value (string, number, boolean, etc.) or `null` has no members or elements to remove.
!!! failure "Example message"
```
cannot remove value: the JSON Patch 'remove' target's parent is of type number, but must be an object or array
```
!!! note
This exception was added in version 3.13.0. Before that, this situation was silently ignored (the `remove` operation had no effect).
## Further exceptions
This exception is thrown in case of errors that cannot be classified with the