Trouble Getting Value From API Hash - Ruby

Question

I am making an API call and receiving the following response:

{
   "id": "http://www.google.com/",
   "shares": 8262403,
   "comments": 827
}

When I do:

api_call["shares"]

It just returns

shares

...and I want the value of "shares" so I have the share count. What am I missing?

Answer 1

You need to use JSON :

require 'json'

str = '{
   "id": "http://www.google.com/",
   "shares": 8262403,
   "comments": 827
}'

JSON.parse(str)['shares'] # => 8262403

When I do api_call["shares"] , It just returns shares .

This is because your response comes as a String . Now on which you are calling String#[] method. The docs str[match_str] → new_str or nil says - If a match_str is given, that string is returned if it occurs in the string.

str['shares'] # => shares

This happened as per the documentation,as I mentioned. Your response string has a substring shares , which is being returned as a method call String#[] , in str['shares'] call.