Question

I’m developing an application that reads some JSON data and makes some statistics, but now I’ve run into a problem.

I have a string like this:

{
"position":[
  {
     "someKey1":"someVal1",
     "someKey2":"someVal2",
  },
  {
     "someKey1":"someVal3",
     "someKey2":"someVal4",
  }
}

I want to access the someKeys and someValues.

I’m converting it to a dictionary like this:

Dictionary<string, object> values = deserializeJSON(json_string);

Edit 1: Sorry, forgot to add deserializeJSON:

private Dictionary<string, object> deserializeJSON(string p_jsonObject)
{
    JavaScriptSerializer serializer = new JavaScriptSerializer();
    return serializer.Deserialize<Dictionary<string, dynamic>>(p_jsonObject);
}

Now I have trouble getting access to the list of values with the key “position”. If I try to print the type of values[“position”] I get:

System.Collections.ArrayList

So I thought I could just iterate through this, but I can’t. I tried using enumerator (read in here that it would make it possible to iterate over the objects, and that I have to add it to an ArrayList to cast it):

ArrayList arr = new ArrayList();
IEnumerable enumerable = values["position"] as IEnumerable;

foreach (object element in enumerable)
{
    arr.Add(element);
}

When I print arr[0] I get:

System.Collections.Generic.Dictionary`2[System.String,System.Object]

Here I’m confused. I assume it’s the list of someKeys and someVals, which should be correct, right?
Now I’ve tried, with no luck, getting access to these values. I tried arr[0][“someKey1”] but get an error that I cannot apply indexing to ‘object’.

Any ideas on a solution? Ideally a more elegant solution? 🙂

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

You can use Linq to JSON (add Newtonsoft’s JSON.NET from NuGet):

JObject jo = JObject.Parse(json);
var value = (string)jo["position"][1]["someKey1"]; // someVal3

Another sample:

JObject jo = JObject.Parse(json);
JArray positions = (JArray)jo["position"];
foreach (var item in positions)
{
    // use (string)item["someKey1"]
    // use (string)item["someKey2"]
}