Question

I have a JSON result in the following format which JSON Lint shows this as a “Valid Response”.

My question is: how do I access the content of “question_mark” since “141”, “8911”, etc are all dynamic values?

My sample code for accessing value of “product”.

//Consider I have the first <code>JSONObject</code> of the "search_result" array and 
//I access it's "product" value as below.
String product = jsonObject.optString("product"); //where jsonObject is of type JSONObject.
//<code>product<code> now contains "abc".

JSON:

{
 "status": "OK",
 "search_result": [

            {
                "product": "abc",
                "id": "1132",
                "question_mark": {
                    "141": {
                        "count": "141",
                        "more_description": "this is abc",
                        "seq": "2"
                    },
                    "8911": {
                        "count": "8911",
                        "more_desc": "this is cup",
                        "seq": "1"
                    }
                },
                "name": "some name",
                "description": "This is some product"
            },
            {
                "product": "XYZ",
                "id": "1129",
                "question_mark": {
                    "379": {
                        "count": "379",
                        "more_desc": "this is xyz",
                        "seq": "5"
                    },
                    "845": {
                        "count": "845",
                        "more_desc": "this is table",
                        "seq": "6"
                    },
                    "12383": {
                        "count": "12383",
                        "more_desc": "Jumbo",
                        "seq": "4"
                    },
                    "257258": {
                        "count": "257258",
                        "more_desc": "large",
                        "seq": "1"
                    }
                },
                "name": "some other name",
                "description": "this is some other product"
            }
       ]
}

My question title “dynamic key” could be wrong but I don’t know at this point what’s a better name for this issue.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

Use JSONObject keys() to get the key and then iterate each key to get to the dynamic value.

Roughly the code will look like:

// searchResult refers to the current element in the array "search_result" but whats searchResult?
JSONObject questionMark = searchResult.getJSONObject("question_mark");
Iterator keys = questionMark.keys();
    
while(keys.hasNext()) {
    // loop to get the dynamic key
    String currentDynamicKey = (String)keys.next();
        
    // get the value of the dynamic key
    JSONObject currentDynamicValue = questionMark.getJSONObject(currentDynamicKey);
        
        // do something here with the value...
}