Question

I’m having some problems with converting some JSON and I’m after some help. This is my problem, I have JSON returned the following:

Example of the JSON recieved (from a CSV file):

[
    {
        "rating": "0",
        "title": "The Killing Kind",
        "author": "John Connolly",
        "type": "Book",
        "asin": "0340771224",
        "tags": "",
        "review": "i still haven't had time to read this one..."
    },
    {
        "rating": "0",
        "title": "The Third Secret",
        "author": "Steve Berry",
        "type": "Book",
        "asin": "0340899263",
        "tags": "",
        "review": "need to find time to read this book"
    },

    cut for brevity   

]

Now, this is a one dimensional array of objects, but I have a function that I need to pass this to that will ONLY take a multidimensional array. There’s nothing I can change on this. I’ve been looking around the web for conversion and came across this code:

if (! obj.length) { return [];} // length must be set on the object, or it is not iterable  
   var a = [];  

   try {  
       a = Array.prototype.slice.call(obj, n);  
   }  
   // IE 6 and posssibly other browsers will throw an exception, so catch it and use brute force  
   catch(e) {  
       Core.batch(obj, function(o, i) {  
           if (n <= i) {  
               a[i - n] = o;  
           }  
       });  
   }  

   return a;  

But my code keeps getting stuck on the “no object length” part. When I iterate through each object, I get character by character. Unfortunately, those field names (rating, title, author), etc are not set in stone and I can’t access anything using the obj.Field notation.

I’m stuck on this; is there a way to convert those objects into arrays, or do I have to go back to the beginning and dump JSON?

Answer 1

There is a nice JavaScript library called Undersore.js which does all kind of object/array manipulations.

Using it you could do the conversion as easy as this

_(json).each(function(elem, key){
    json[key] = _(elem).values();
});