Question

I have a large amount of nested data formatted in JSON.

I would like to select for a single element:

{“data”: [
{“id”: “123456”,”from”: {“name”: “Jason Wade”,”id”:
“654321”},”message”:
“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfXHAqBRIEk”
…

1. How do I efficiently select for
   a single element, say “message”?

2. Is there a simple recommended
   method for this? Say convert it to
   an array, or something?

3. Could you point me to some reading for
   parsing JSON?

Thanks!

Answer 1

If you are using Rails, see the question in my comment. If you are using pure Ruby, there is a gem called json. Install the gem, and use like this

require 'rubygems'
require 'json'
url = "www.example.com/api?format=json"
response = Net::HTTP.get_response(URI.parse(url))
data = response.body
result = JSON.parse(data)

JSON format and ruby data types have similarity and in your example, the result will be a hash like this

{"data"=>[{"message"=>"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfXHAqBRIEk", "from"=>{"name"=>"Jason Wade", "id"=>"654321"}, "id"=>"123456"}]}