Converting text to JSON

Question

How would you recommend converting a text file to JSON format?

I have a text file with about 500 bits of text in the following format:

[number in brackets or astriek]
[line1]
[line2]
[line3]
[space]
.
.
.

I want to convert it to JSON, like so:

"page1": {
   "line1": "LINE1",
   "line2": "LINE2",
   "line3": "LINE3"
},
"page2": {
   "line1": "LINE1",
   "line2": "LINE2",
   "line3": "LINE3"
}
.
.
.

Ideas?

Answer 1

You could use Gelatin.

You'd use a grammar to define your input text (can be a little difficult if you've never done it before). Then you just run your text file through Gelatin with your grammar file, and specify the output.

Edit 1: It would be helpful if you would post a snippet of what you are trying to convert.

Answer 2

The simplest for me would be do to it in java or go.

In Java :

• you can read a file line after line with readLine using a new BufferedReader(new FileReader(file))
• you can fill a HashMap of HashMap<String,String> during the reading
• create a new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(outputfilepath))
• using gson, you then just have to use

this :

Gson gson = new Gson();
gson.toJson(myList, myFileOutputStreamWriter);

In Go :

You don't need to import an external package, Go includes the needed ones.

This would be something like this (some other error testing would be good) :

package main

import (
    "bufio"
    "fmt"
    "io"
    "encoding/json"
    "log"
    "strings"
    "os"
)

func main() {
    myBigThing := make(map[string]map[string]string)
    f, _ := os.Open("/home/dys/dev/go/src/tests/test.go")
    r := bufio.NewReader(f)
    var currentPage map[string]string
    pageNum := 0
    for {
        line, err := r.ReadString('\n')
        if err != nil {
            if err != io.EOF {
                log.Println("Error in parsing :", err)
            }
            break
        }
        if currentPage==nil {
            currentPage = make(map[string]string)
            myBigThing[fmt.Sprintf("page%d",pageNum)] = currentPage
            pageNum++
        } else if line=="" {
            currentPage = nil
        } else {
            tokens := strings.Split(line, ":")
            if len(tokens)==2 {
                currentPage[tokens[0]] = tokens[1]
            }   
        }       
    }
    f, err := os.Create("/home/dys/test.json")
    if err != nil {
        log.Println("Error :", err)
        return
    }
    defer f.Close()
    bout, _ := json.Marshal(myBigThing)
    f.Write(bout)
}