java - How to force JSON-lib's JSONObject.put(..) to escape a string containing JSON?

Question

When using JSON-lib's JSONObject, how can I stop the put method from storing a String which contains JSON as JSON rather than as an escaped string?

For instance:

JSONObject obj = new JSONObject();
obj.put("jsonStringValue","{"hello":"world"}");
obj.put("naturalStringValue", ""hello world"");
System.out.println(obj.toString());
System.out.println(obj.getString("jsonStringValue"));
System.out.println(obj.getString("naturalStringValue"));

prints:

{"jsonStringValue":{"hello":"world"},"naturalStringValue":""hello world""}
{"hello":"world"}
"hello world"

and I want it to print:

{"jsonStringValue":"{"hello":"world"}","naturalStringValue":""hello world""}
{"hello":"world"}
"hello world"

Yes, I realize this is obnoxious. However, this is in support of a JSON serialization pipeline for which, for interoperability's sake, this is the expected behavior. There are cases in which we would be serializing user input which may be/contain valid JSON. We wouldn't want the user input to become a part of the JSON object that we're serializing said input to.

Manual escaping doesn't work because it causes JSON-lib to escape the characters:

JSONObject obj = new JSONObject();
obj.put("naturalJSONValue","{"hello":"world"}");
obj.put("escapedJSONValue", "{"hello":"world"}");
System.out.println(obj.toString());
System.out.println(obj.getString("naturalJSONValue"));
System.out.println(obj.getString("escapedJSONValue"));

Output:

{"naturalJSONValue":{"hello":"world"},"escapedJSONValue":"{"hello":"world"}"}
{"hello":"world"}
{"hello":"world"}

At this point, any workarounds to enable manual selective escaping of a complex JSON object would completely negate the value of using JSON-lib in the first place.

Also, I understand that this question has been asked before, but unfortunately I cannot accept its answer so easily. JSON-lib is a heavily-used dependency in many areas of my project and swapping it out would be a big undertaking. I need to be absolutely sure that there's no way to achieve this goal with JSON-lib before I can entertain a swap to Jackson, simple-json, or Gson.

Answer 1

This worked for me with json-lib 2.4:

System.out.println(
    new JSONStringer()
        .object()
            .key("jsonStringValue")
                .value("{"hello":"world"}")
            .key("naturalStringValue")
                .value(""hello world"")
        .endObject()
    .toString());

The output is:

{"jsonStringValue":"{"hello":"world"}","naturalStringValue":""hello world""}

Is that a possible solution for you?

UPDATE:

Revised my answer with a possible solution