Question

In my current project I have to read a JavaScript file from the web and extract an object from it. The variable can vary from time to time, so I have to read it instead of hard coding it into my android app.

Say I want to extract the following variable (and parse the string using JSONObject after that, which is trivial):

var abc.xyz = {
"a": {"one", "two", "three"},
"b": {"four", "five"}
}

I have a problem with this. Do I have to implement some compiler-like scanner just to look for the name and get its value, or there is some existing tool I can use?

The JavaScript file is not as simple as this example. It contains a lot of other code. So a simple new JSONObject() or something will not do.

Answer 1

There are many libraries in Java to parse the JSON. There is a list on JSON.org

Read the file with Java

import org.json.JSONObject;

URL url = new URL("http://example.com/foo.js");
InputStream urlInputStream = url.openStream();
JSONObject json = new JSONObject(urlInputStream.toString());