jsonschema lint --fix aborts when a $ref appears inside a `patternProperties` whose key contains `/`

[Vaibhav701161]

Environment

• CLI version: jsonschema --version → 14.12.0
• Node version: (output of node --version)
• OS: Linux (WSL Ubuntu)

---

Summary

Running:

jsonschema lint --fix schema.json

fails with:

error: Could not autofix the schema without breaking its internal references
at location "/patternProperties/^~1~1.*/$ref"

The tool aborts safely, but the auto-fix does not complete.

---

Minimal Reproducible Example

{
  "$schema": "http://json-schema.org/draft-07/schema#",
  "$defs": {
    "foo": { "description": "ignored" }
  },
  "type": "object",
  "patternProperties": {
    "^//.*": { "$ref": "#/$defs/foo" }
  }
}

Then:

jsonschema lint --fix schema.json

Observed error:

Could not autofix the schema without breaking its internal references
at location "/patternProperties/^~1~1.*/$ref"

---

Observations

• The patternProperties key contains /.

• In JSON Pointer encoding, ^//.* becomes ^~1~1.*.

• The reported failure location:

  /patternProperties/^~1~1.*/$ref
  

  correctly maps to that key.

The error location suggests the fixer's JSON Pointer decoder/encoder fails to correctly handle the tilde-escaped path when reconstructing updated $ref values during the $defs → definitions rewrite.

Flattening $defs or removing / from the pattern key avoids the failure.

---

Question

Is this:

• A known limitation of pointer reconstruction during auto-fix?
• An edge case in handling escaped JSON Pointer segments?
• Expected conservative behavior for certain graph rewrites?

If useful, I can provide additional test cases.

[Vaibhav701161]

Workaround

In my case, the failure was happening when a $ref inside patternProperties was pointing deep into a $defs entry, like this:

{
  "$defs": {
    "ignored-prop": {
      "custom":  { "description": "Custom property" },
      "comment": { "description": "Comment property" },
      "schema":  { "description": "JSON schema" }
    }
  },
  "patternProperties": {
    "^//.*": {
      "$ref": "#/$defs/ignored-prop/comment"
    }
  }
}

Here the $ref navigates multiple segments:

#/$defs/ignored-prop/comment

To resolve it, I flattened the $defs structure so that each reusable schema is a direct child of $defs, instead of acting like a namespace container.

Updated version:

{
  "$defs": {
    "ignored-prop-comment": {
      "description": "Comment property"
    }
  },
  "patternProperties": {
    "^//.*": {
      "$ref": "#/$defs/ignored-prop-comment"
    }
  }
}

So instead of referencing:

#/$defs/ignored-prop/comment

it now references:

#/$defs/ignored-prop-comment

After this change, running:

jsonschema lint --fix schema.json

completed successfully and performed the $defs → definitions rewrite without aborting.

the command ran successfully and the schema health got fixed