Parse JSON-like data in NodeJS

Question

I am getting a return from an API call through NodeJS as data similar to JSON.

I am getting the reply as:

{ abc: 10,
  qwe: 5 }

If the above was as shown below:

{ "abc": 10,
  "qwe": 5 }

I could have used JSON.parse function, but the former can't be used with JSON.parse.

Is there any way I can get the value of qwe from that response?

Answer 1

Option 1: It's already an object.

The item you're showing is already an object. It doesn't need parsing through. JSON.parse() is meant to go through a string and turn it into an object. just work with the object itself.

Example:

const object = {abc:10, qwe:5};

console.log(object.abc);       // > 10
console.log(object["qwe"]);    // > 5

Option 2: It is a non-JSON string.

In this case maybe you can predict the pattern and manually turn into a JSON format that you can parse later?

something like:

const nonJson = "{abc: 10, qwe: 5 }";
let jsoned = nonJson.replace(/(:\s+)/g, "\":\"");
jsoned = jsoned.replace(/(,\s+)/g, "\",\"");
jsoned = jsoned.replace(/({\s*)/, "{\"");
jsoned = jsoned.replace(/(\s+})/, "\"}");

const object = JSON.parse(jsoned);

Answer 2

There is a way to do this, it's a bit ugly though, you can do:

var unquotedJson = '{ abc: 10, qwe: 5 }';

var object = eval('('+ unquotedJson +')');

NB: eval is only to be used with a trusted source, since it will execute JavaScript code.

I should also mention that unquoted JSON is not really JSON!