JSON - Access field named '*' asterisk

Question

I am trying to access a JSON field that has the key '*':

{ 
  "parse": { 
    "text": {
      "*": "text i want to access" 
    }
  }
}

Neither myObject.parse.text.* nor myObject.parse.text[0] works.

I have searched for an hour but haven't found any hint that an asterisk has special meaning. If I just traverse the complete tree and make String comparison with if (key == "*") I can retrieve the text, but I would like to access this field directly. How can I do that?

Answer 1

json.parse.text["*"]

Yucky name for an object member.

---

Asterisks have no special meaning; it's a string like any other.

myObject.parse.text.* doesn't work because * isn't a legal JS identifier. Dot notation requires legal identifiers for each segment.

myObject.parse.text[0] doesn't work because [n] accesses the element keyed by n or an array element at index n. There is no array in the JSON, and there is nothing with a 0 key.

There is an element at the key '*', so json.parse.text['*'] works.

Answer 2

Try use the index operator on parse.text:

var value = object.parse.text["*"];

Answer 3

try to use

var text = myObject.parse.text['*']