PostgreSQL treating TEXT as JSON

Question

I have a TEXT column in my table (it's actually 'character varying'), but the data in the column is valid json. How can I access fields in this column using Postgres 9.3's new JSON functions?

What I basically want is a way to be able to do:

SELECT mycolumn->'myfield' from mytable;

Do I need to convert the entire column to the native JSON datatype, or is there an easy/efficient way to cast the cells?

Answer 1

You need a type cast:

SELECT mycolumn::json->'myfield' FROM mytable;