Question

I have an output from an API that look like this… (its a string)

[[2121212,212121,asd],[2323232,23232323,qasdasd]]

Its a string – not an array. I want to convert it to an array and then extract the first two elements in each array in the nested array to:

[2121212,212121],[2323232,23232323]

What’s the best way to do this ruby? I could use regexp and extract – but basically the string is already an array, however the class is a string.

I tried

array.push(response)

but that just put the string in to the array as one element. I guess what would be nice is a to_array method

Answer 1

Assuming this is a JSON response (and if so, it is badly malformed and you should talk to the people that are responsible for this) you could write something like:

require 'json'

input= '[[2121212,212121,Asd],[2323232,23232323,qasdasd]]'
input.gsub!(/([A-Za-z ]+)/,'"\1"')
json = JSON.parse input
output = json.map{|x| x[0...2]}
p output

this prints

[[2121212, 212121], [2323232, 23232323]]