Question

I have looked at GSON to parse some of my JSON objects. However, this particular JSON object is indexed like below:

{
    {
        "1":
            {"name":"Mike","age":"27"},
        "2":
            {"name":"Sarah","age":"23"},
        "3":
            {"name":"Jenny","age":"19"},
        "4":
            {"name":"Joe","age":"24"},
        "5":
            {"name":"Bob","age":"21"},

            ...and so on
    }
}

From my understanding, each key corresponds to a variable name for the appropriate GSON object. For example, for “5”, I would have a class like this:

public class Person {
    private String name;
    private int age;
}

However, in this case, how will I take care of “1”, “2”, “3”, “4”, and “5”? There can be any number of indices so I cannot simply name the variables “1”, “2”, “3”, “4”, and “5” (and it goes against variable naming rules). Can GSON help me in this case?

Answer 1

Try deserializing as a Map. You’ll need to use Gson’s TypeToken class to get a reference to a parameterized type:

Type type = new TypeToken<Map<String, Person>>() {}.getType();
Map<String, Person> people = gson.fromJson(json, type);