Question

i’m trying to parse some json in perl, but am having problems with it. i’ve read over the docs for it, but still not fully understanding how to code it. i found a few tutorials for it, but still getting errors. here is the code i have:

fetch_json_page("http://api.oodle.com/api/v2/listings?key=TEST&format=json&region=usa&category=sale");

sub fetch_json_page
{
  my ($json_url) = @_;
  my $browser = WWW::Mechanize->new();
  eval{
    # download the json page:
    print "Getting json $json_url\n";
    $browser->get( $json_url );
    my $content = $browser->content();
    my $json = new JSON;

    my $json_text = $json->allow_nonref->utf8($content);

    my @decoded_json = decode_json($json_text);
    print Dumper(@decoded_json), length(@decoded_json), "\n";

when i run it, i get this error

Getting json http://api.oodle.com/api/v2/listings?key=TEST&region=usa&category=sale
[[JSON ERROR]] JSON parser crashed! malformed JSON string, neither array, object, number, string or atom, at character offset 0 (before "(end of string)") at ./oodle2.pl line 35.

which makes me wonder if i’m getting the data in properly. the url works correctly is pasted into a browser and i’ve done it fine w/ javascript, but having problems with perl. i added the print Dumper piece to try and print out the json response so i knew if the data was coming in properly

thanks

Answer 1

That URL returns XML, not JSON.

EDIT due to OP updating link

If you look, that’s not a valid JSON object that it’s returning thus your parser is failing. The JSON is wrapped by jsonOodleApi(json is here);

If you remove the function call thing, it’ll parse.