Question

is there a way to deserialize strings to objects in actionscript:

i.e.

  var str:String = "{ id: 1, value: ['a', 500] }";

should be made into an appropriate actionscript object.

this is not json, since the keys are not wrapped in quotes.

Answer 1

Ok, for that type of data pattern, there’s not a nice way that I know of to do this. going off the assumption you can’t affect the data to make it more JSON-like … here’s off the top of my head what I would conceptually try:

var str:String = "{ id:1, value:['a', 500] }";
// strip off the { and } characters since we've nothing nice to do that for us...
var mynewString:String = str.slice(1, str.length - 1);
var stringItems:Array = mynewString.split(",");
var obj:Object = new Object();
for (var i in stringItems)
{
    var objProps:Array = stringItems[i].split(":");
    // kill off the quotes here
    obj[props[0]] = objProps[1].slice(1, objProps[1].length - 1);

    if ( obj[props[0]].indexOf('[') == 0 ) {
        // remove [ and ] if there
        var maybeStrArray:String = obj[props[0]].slice(1, str.length - 1);

        // right now assume we're an array based on our inbound data
        var strArr:Array = maybeStrArray.split(",");
        obj[props[0]] = strArr;
    }
}   

Something like that or similar to it anyway. Yes, it’s crude, and absolutely it could be fashioned in a way that is more flexible (such as move the string to array convert to its own function so I could use it elsewhere). It’s just the first thing that conceptually came to mind as an answer.

Try that, tweak around with it and see if it helps.