I am trying to do a simple weather widget for Android, that provides temperatures just for my country (Jordan). The website I am using for the weather records provides a JSON file with country regions data for many countries. The problem is that the file contains 2500+ objects, and it takes a really long time to be parsed. Thus, and as I actually need <100 of them (the regions of my country), I thought that I could optimize the file before passing it to the JSON parser, by taking off all of the records I don’t need. I don’t know if it’s a good solution, but it was what I thought of. Anyway, my problem now is getting the right Regex.
This is the URL of the JSON file.
As you can see, every object has four items. The one I need to check for is “icon”, which specifies the country of that region.
EXAMPLE:
{"value":"khalda","icon":"Jordan","label":"khalda","desc":"Amman & Madaba"},
What I could came up with so far is the pattern of the object I actually need. However, I need to get the ones I don’t need to be able to delete them. Here is the pattern: \{[^\{]*Jordan*[^\}]*\}, (This has to be modified so it validates when “Jordan” does NOT exist, which I couldn’t figure out.)
Any help/hint is highly appreciated.
Thanks.
Rather than matching and deleting the objects you don’t need, match and extract the single(?) object that you do need. It will be faster.
(And I agree with minitech’s comment. Parsing the JSON file is unlikely to be the real bottleneck.)