Question

How can I convert a JSON string to an object in JavaScript? Is there a method that does this?

Something like:

var x = "{  id: 5, name: 'hello'  }";
var y = /*something*/(x);

alert(y.id + " " + y.name);

Answer 1

As per the comments and question history it look like that you’re already using jQuery. In that case, it’s good to know that jQuery ships with a new parseJSON() function since version 1.4.1 which was released late January this year. Consider upgrading if you’re not at 1.4.1 yet. Here’s an extract of relevance from its API documentation:

Description: Takes a well-formed JSON string and returns the resulting JavaScript object.

jQuery.parseJSON( json ) version added: 1.4.1

json The JSON string to parse.

Passing in a malformed JSON string will result in an exception being thrown. For example, the following are all malformed JSON strings:

• {test: 1} (test does not have double quotes around it).
• {'test': 1} (‘test’ is using single quotes instead of double quotes).

Additionally if you pass in nothing, an empty string, null, or undefined, ‘null’ will be returned from parseJSON. Where the browser provides a native implementation of JSON.parse, jQuery uses it to parse the string. For details on the JSON format, see http://json.org/.

Example:

Parse a JSON string.

var obj = jQuery.parseJSON('{"name":"John"}');
alert( obj.name === "John" );