Question

I want to build a JSON string programmatically. The end product should be something like this:

var myParamsJson = {first_name: "Bob", last_name: "Smith" };

However, I would like to do it one parameter at a time. If it were an array, I would do something like this:

var myParamsArray = [];
myParamsArray["first_name"] = "Bob";
myParamsArray["last_name"] = "Smith";

I wouldn’t even mind building that array and then converting it to JSON.

Answer 1

You could do a similar thing with objects:

var myObj = {};
myObj["first_name"] = "Bob";
myObj["last_name"] = "Smith";

and then you could use the JSON.stringify method to turn that object into a JSON string.

var json = JSON.stringify(myObj);
alert(json);

will show:

{"first_name":"Bob","last_name":"Smith"}

This method is natively built into all modern browsers (even IE8 supports it, even if IE8 is very far from being a modern browser). And if you need to support some legacy browsers you could include the json2.js script.