Parsing JSON structure dynamiclly

K

kr651129

I know this isn't a FreeBSD specific question but I'm hoping to get some help from others who may have ran into the same problem. I'm writing a Java application that gets some JSON data that I need to parse and I'm having a difficult time with it, I'm hoping someone here could shed some light.

The problem I'm having is I never know what the JSON data will look like beforehand. I need to get the JSON structure dynamically. Take the following pseudo-JSON as an example:

Code: 
{
    "glossary": {
        "title": "example glossary",
        "GlossDiv": {
            "title": "S",
            "GlossList": {
                "GlossEntry": {
                    "ID": "SGML",
                    "SortAs": "SGML",
                    "GlossTerm": "Standard Generalized Markup Language",
                    "Acronym": "SGML",
                    "Abbrev": "ISO 8879:1986",
                    "GlossDef": {
                        "para": "A meta-markup language, used to create markup languages such as DocBook.",
                        "GlossSeeAlso": ["GML", "XML"]
                    },
                    "GlossSee": "markup"
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

I found a library called JSON-Path that will allow me to call values from the above object similar to x-path with XML. The problem: I need to know the structure of the above object to be able to use JSON-Path.

Ideally I'd like to have it broken down in an ArrayList. Maybe using RegEx? Any insight to this problem would be helpful.

Thank you!

Edit:
Sorry if I'm not using the right JSON terms I've not worked with it much in the past, and I can't stand this format.
 
Check out JSONlib. It can parse the JSON string to an abstract object that you can then analyze programmatically.

Should not hate JSON, hate your JSON support :D. I prefer JSON serialization over any other format, because it is quite compact and well supported.
 
Thanks for the reply. I downloaded the library and will play with it today. If you don't mind, let me ask you a couple more things about JSON since you sound like you know what you're doing with it. I've had a hard time coming across good help for what I'm trying to do.

From what I understand if I want to get a JSON object and parse it correctly I have to explicitly create a POJO that matches the JSON I'm receiving. As you can imagine this is a problem for me since I don't know what the data is ahead of time.

Using the same JSON example as I posted, the best I've been able to achieve is getting the first object name, "glossary" and then "glossdiv", everything inside of "glossdiv" returns as one string. Then I try to continue parsing the strings returned but I get a malformed JSON object.

Just doing a quick once over of the library you suggested it seams as though it's fairly similar to the others I've tried in that I need to create a POJO with the JSON format in mind.

I figured if I (using the same JSON I posed) could create some sort of Map that would breakdown the hierarchy of the JSON I could using the JSON-Path library to call the data I need since I'll have the structure saved without having to create a strict POJO.

Any advice/JSON expertise it welcome. And again sorry if the vocab since I'm only a few weeks into working with JSON.
 
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