Question

I’m working with a large set of json and really just need the NSString representation of what’s inside the NSArray -including all the { }

My question is this – is their a better way than simply looping through each NSArray inside the main NSArray and outputting the description one by one?

ie- the below is a start to this process but it’s very brittle meaning I need to know each item inside the hat {} and this isn’t something I actually care about. I just need the json string to move forward.

The working code is below (thank you in advance!)

NSString* responseString = [[NSString alloc] initWithData:responseData encoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
    [responseData release];
  NSArray* json = [responseString JSONValue];
  NSArray* item = [json valueForKeyPath:@"d.data"];
  NSArray* hatjson = [item objectForKey:@"hat"];

  NSMutableString * result = [[NSMutableString alloc] init];
  for (NSObject * obj in hatjson)
  {
    [result appendString:[obj description]];
  }
  NSLog(@"the hat json is .. %@", result);

Answer 1

// …
NSArray* hatjson = [item objectForKey:@"hat"];
NSString *result = [hatjson JSONRepresentation];
NSLog(@"the hat json is .. %@", result);

I’m assuming you’re using SBJSON for JSON parsing. SBJSON defines a category on NSObject that includes the method

- (NSString *)JSONRepresentation;

This method returns a string with the JSON representation of a given object so long as the object is an instance of a class which SBJSON can convert to JSON (e.g. strings, numbers, arrays, dictionaries).