Convert JSON to Map

Question

I hope you were joking about writing your own parser. :-)

For such a simple mapping, most tools from http://json.org (section java) would work. For one of them (Jackson https://github.com/FasterXML/jackson-databind/#5-minute-tutorial-streaming-parser-generator), you'd do:

Map<String,Object> result =
        new ObjectMapper().readValue(JSON_SOURCE, HashMap.class);

(where JSON_SOURCE is a File, input stream, reader, or json content String)

Using the GSON library:

import com.google.gson.Gson;
import com.google.common.reflect.TypeToken;
import java.lang.reclect.Type;

Use the following code:

Type mapType = new TypeToken<Map<String, Map>>(){}.getType();  
Map<String, String[]> son = new Gson().fromJson(easyString, mapType);

I like google gson library.
When you don't know structure of json. You can use

JsonElement root = new JsonParser().parse(jsonString);

and then you can work with json. e.g. how to get "value1" from your gson:

String value1 = root.getAsJsonObject().get("data").getAsJsonObject().get("field1").getAsString();

Use JSON lib E.g. http://www.json.org/java/

// Assume you have a Map<String, String> in JSONObject jdata
@SuppressWarnings("unchecked")
Iterator<String> nameItr = jdata.keys();
Map<String, String> outMap = new HashMap<String, String>();
while(nameItr.hasNext()) {
    String name = nameItr.next();
    outMap.put(name, jdata.getString(name));

}

My post could be helpful for others, so imagine you have a map with a specific object in values, something like that:

{  
   "shopping_list":{  
      "996386":{  
         "id":996386,
         "label":"My 1st shopping list",
         "current":true,
         "nb_reference":6
      },
      "888540":{  
         "id":888540,
         "label":"My 2nd shopping list",
         "current":false,
         "nb_reference":2
      }
   }
}

To parse this JSON file with GSON library, it's easy : if your project is mavenized

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.google.code.gson</groupId>
    <artifactId>gson</artifactId>
    <version>2.3.1</version>
</dependency>

Then use this snippet :

import com.google.gson.Gson;
import com.google.gson.JsonElement;
import com.google.gson.JsonObject;
import com.google.gson.JsonParser;

//Read the JSON file
JsonElement root = new JsonParser().parse(new FileReader("/path/to/the/json/file/in/your/file/system.json"));

//Get the content of the first map
JsonObject object = root.getAsJsonObject().get("shopping_list").getAsJsonObject();

//Iterate over this map
Gson gson = new Gson();
for (Entry<String, JsonElement> entry : object.entrySet()) {
    ShoppingList shoppingList = gson.fromJson(entry.getValue(), ShoppingList.class);
    System.out.println(shoppingList.getLabel());
}

The corresponding POJO should be something like that :

public class ShoppingList {

    int id;

    String label;

    boolean current;

    int nb_reference;

    //Setters & Getters !!!!!
}

Hope it helps !