iOS JSON NSString Parse

Question

I have a JSON string as an NSString object in iOS. I want to parse this and pull out the given parameters in the JSON string. Is there a efficient way to parse this or is the only way to search for substrings etc.?

Answer 1

The way to do it with iOS 5 is to use the NSJSONSerialization class. You will want to first convert your string to an NSData object, and call the class method JSONObjectWithData

NSData *jsonData = [myJsonString dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
NSError *e;
NSDictionary *dict = [NSJSONSerialization JSONObjectWithData:jsonData options:nil error:&e];

Note that JSONObjectWithData will return either an NSDictionary or an NSArray, depending whether your JSON string represents an a dictionary or an array.

Answer 2

A good framework for converting JSON strings to Objective-C objects ( NSArray and NSDictionary ) is SBJson ( Github ).

Usage:

NSDictionary *dict = [myJsonString JSONValue];