Question

I’m using Android, and I have a strange question: how can I parse JSON data that has the following format:

"2"

The JSON URL result is this number only, without any brackets ({ } or [ ]). How this array is formed? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

First retrieve the remote URL and decide if it is JSON or text/plain

URL url = new URL("http://www.google.com/humans.txt");
HttpURLConnection http = (HttpURLConnection)url.openConnection();
int status = http.getResponseCode();
String contentType = http.getContentType();
String encoding = http.getContentEncoding() == null ? "utf-8" : http.getContentEncoding();

Read out the response body.

InputStream in = new BufferedInputStream(urlConnection.getInputStream());
ByteArrayOutputStream out = new ByteArrayOutputStream();
int len = 0;
byte[] buffer = new buffer[1024];
while (len = (in.read(buffer)) {
  out.write(buffer, 0, len);
}
String contents = new String(out.toByteArray(), encoding);

Based on the content type header you can decide if it is JSON or a plain/text contents. Alternatively, peek at the first character to see if it is an opening curly brace.

if (contentType == null) {
    // handle bad doc here
} else if (contentType.equals("application/json") || content.startsWith("{")) {
    // parse JSON document here
} else if (content.equals("2")) {
    // handle 2
} else if (content.equals("WRONG_PASS") || content.equals("WRONG_USER")) {
    // handle wrong user/pass
} else {
  // handle this as well
}