Question

Evidently jQuery has made me dumb.

I’ve got a local url that serves up raw JSON, and I can’t figure out how to consume that json from within my method without using jQuery.

Here’s how I know to do it WITH jQuery

var myJson;
$.getJSON('/local/path/to/json', function (data) { 
    myJson = data; 
});

// Now I can use myJson in a method.

Answer 1

To retrieve the JSON string from a server use XMLHttpRequest object as described in this reference:

http://developer.mozilla.org/en/XMLHttpRequest

You’ll find that it’s quite involved with all the unseen things you need to account and check for. Thus libraries like jQuery.

To convert the JSON string to a javascript object, use JSON.parse(). Here’s the reference:

http://developer.mozilla.org/En/Using_native_JSON

Here’s an example:

function readJSON(file) {
    var request = new XMLHttpRequest();
    request.open('GET', file, false);
    request.send(null);
    if (request.status == 200)
        return request.responseText;
};

var myObject = JSON.parse(readJSON('/local/path/to/json'));

EDIT #2: Thanks for editing in this example, Chase. A word of warning. It is not a good idea to make the open() method a synchronous call by using false in the 3rd parm. AJAX is intentionally designed for asynchronous use, and to make a synchronous call invites lock ups. As one who used to think there was a place for synchronous calls, I now find there’s always a better way to get it done asynchronously. Word to the wise.