Question

I’m using Bing’s auto suggest feature to auto suggest me terms given a query. You can find the tool here: http://api.bing.com/osjson.aspx?query=pe as you can see it’s returning a strange format that isn’t quite JSON. Is this a specific standard different to JSON? I’ve attempted parsing it as JSON using…

        InputStream i = new URL(url).openStream();
    BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(i, Charset.forName("UTF-8")));
    JSONObject json = new JSONObject(readAll(reader));

but I get the error A JSONObject text must begin with '{' found:" at 2 [character 3 line 1]

readAll =

      private static String readAll(Reader rd) throws IOException {
        StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
        int cp;
        while ((cp = rd.read()) != -1) {
          sb.append((char) cp);
        }
        return sb.toString();
      }

Answer 1

Your example is valid JSON:

["pe",["people","people search","petsmart","petco","petfinder","pep boys","people finder","people of walmart"]]

It is not object, it is array, which contains string at the first position and another array at the second. So try parse as JSONArray, not as JSONObject.