How to parse a JSON array of strings?

Question

I need to parse an array of strings (identifiers) using Jackson. I didn't find any example of it on the inte.net, all of them show how to deserialize arrays of objects of some class, but I need just to parse an array of strings (without writing a model class for it), how can I do that? Example of JSON:

[
"UUID",
"UUID",
...
]

Answer 1

You can use the ObjectMapper.readValue() method with a TypeReference to get a list of strings:

import com.fasterxml.jackson.core.type.TypeReference;
import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ObjectMapper;

import java.io.IOException;
import java.util.List;

public class Test {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
        String json = "[\"UUID\",\"UUID\"]";
        ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
        List<String> values = mapper.readValue(json,
                new TypeReference<List<String>>() {});
    }
}

Or you can use the ObjectMapper.readValue() method with the String[].class to get an array of strings:

import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ObjectMapper;

import java.io.IOException;

public class Test {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException {
        String json = "[\"UUID\",\"UUID\"]";
        ObjectMapper mapper = new ObjectMapper();
        String[] values = mapper.readValue(json, String[].class);
    }
}