Extract data from json string with or without JSONObject

Question

I've got the following json code stored in a java String:

String str = {"posts":[{"key":"key1","value":"x"},{"key":"key2","value":"0"},{"key":"key3","value":"y"}]}

Is there a way to extract the values from the string using JSONObject or should I use the old school method:

 String[] parts = str.split("\"");

In my case the values are stored in the array at the positions: parts[9] , parts[17] and parts[25] . It works well so far, but I wonder if I could use JSONObject for that task?

Answer 1

Use Gson library provided by google if you are using Java

https://github.com/google/gson

Here you can convert your java to Json and Json back to java objects seamlessly.

Answer 2

Using JSONObject (from the org.json package, JSON-java ), you can easily extract values.

final JSONObject jsonObject = new JSONObject(str);
final JSONArray posts = jsonObject.getJSONArray("posts");
final Collection<String> values = new ArrayList<>(posts.length());

for (int i = 0; i < posts.length(); i++) {
    final JSONObject post = posts.getJSONObject(i);
    values.add(post.getString("value"));
}

// values = [x, 0, y]

I'd absolutely avoid any kind of manual String manipulation.