Escape Newlines in Swift as a Raw String - json

I have a JSON string in Swift 5 that is like this:
var text = """
{"ops": [{"insert": "Hello World!\n"},{"attributes": {"bold": true},"insert": "bold"},{"insert": "What if the "}, {"attributes": {"italic": true},"insert": "italic"}, {"insert": " text was awesome?\n\n"} ]}
"""
I pass that to a WKWebView where it is parsed with JSON.parse(text) so it can be rendered. At present, the JS complains that it's invalid. But if I manually edit the original string and replace all the \n with \\n, it works.
I need to turn \n into \\n programmatically and come out with a string on the other end.
I've tried this:
let raw = #"\#(text)"#
let ready = raw.replacingOccurrences(of: "\n", with: "\\n")
But it treats the newline characters as characters instead of as raw string elements.
It seems like this should be easy, but I can't see what I'm missing. Any ideas?

I found a solution to this. It isn't necessarily an answer to my question, but it avoids the issue altogether.
Prior to sending the JSON data to the Javascript in the WKWebView, I encode it to a string using Base64 encoding. This eliminates the need to worry about escaping characters and such. It works great. :)

Related

Escape string in a JSON object

We use Freemarker to transform one JSON to another. The input JSON is something like this:
{"k1": "a", "k2":"line1. \n line2"}
Post using the Freemarker template, the JSON is converted to:
{ \n\n "p1": "a", \n\n "p2": "line1. \n line2"}
Here is the logic we use to do the transformation
final Map<String, Object> input = JsonConverter.convertFromJson(input, Map.class);
final Template template = freeMarkerConfiguration.getTemplate("Template1.ftl");
final Writer out = new StringWriter();
template.process(input, out);
out.flush();
final String newlineFilteredResult = new JSONObject(out.toString).toString();
The conversion to JSON object fails due to a newline character inside a string for key k2 and gives the following exception:
Caused by: org.json.JSONException: Unterminated string at ...
I tried using the following but nothing works:
1. JSONObject.quote
2. JSONValue.escape
3. out.toString().replaceAll("[\n\r]+", "\\n");
I get the following exception due to the newline characters at the beginning as well:
Caused by: org.json.JSONException: Missing value at 1 [character 2 line 1]
Could someone please point me in the correct direction.
Edit
After further clarification from OP he had "${key}": "${value}" in his freemarker template and ${value} could contain line brakes. The solution in this case is to use ${value?json_string}.
Starting from FreeMarker 2.3.32 you can write "${key}": ${value?c} instead of "${key}": "${value}", because if the left-side of ?c is a string, now instead of failing, it quotes and escapes the string. Thus you don't even have to know if the left-side is a number/boolean, which must not be quoted (and ?c won't quote them), or a string, which must be quoted, as it's automatic.
Also, if the left-value is known to be missing/null sometimes, them ?cn will handle that case by printing a null literal.
Also, check out the c_format setting for best results, but by default string formatting is JSON compatible, so using ?c will be an improvement even without setting that.

Ruby parse string to json

So I have some json that looks like this, which I got after taking it out of some other json by doing response.body.to_json:
{\n \"access_token\": \"<some_access_token>\",\n \"token_type\": \"Bearer\",\n \"expires_in\": 3600,\n \"id_token\": \<some_token>\"\n}\n"
I want to pull out the access_token, so I do
to_return = {token: responseJson[:access_token]}
but this gives me a
TypeError: no implicit conversion of Symbol into Integer
Why? How do I get my access token out? Why are there random backslashes everywhere?
to_json doesn't parse JSON - it does the complete opposite: it turns a ruby object into a string containing the JSON representation of that object is.
It's not clear from your question what response.body is. It could be a string, or depending on your http library it might have already been parsed for you.
If the latter then
response.body["access_token"]
Will be your token, if the former then try
JSON.parse(response.body)["access_token"]
Use with double quotes when calling access_token. Like below:
to_return = {token: responseJson["access_token"]}
Or backslashes are escaped delimiters and make sure you first parse JSON.

Importing JSON into R with in-line quotation marks

I'm attempting to read the following JSON file ("my_file.json") into R, which contains the following:
[{"id":"484","comment":"They call me "Bruce""}]
using the jsonlite package (0.9.12), the following fails:
library(jsonlite)
fromJSON(readLines('~/my_file.json'))
receiving an error:
"Error in parseJSON(txt) : lexical error: invalid char in json text.
84","comment":"They call me "Bruce""}]
(right here) ------^"
Here is the output from R escaping of the file:
readLines('~/my_file.json')
"[{\"id\":\"484\",\"comment\":\"They call me \"Bruce\"\"}]"
Removing the quotes around "Bruce" solves the problem, as in:
my_file.json
[{"id":"484","comment":"They call me Bruce"}]
But what is the issue with the escapement?
In R strings literals can be defined using single or double quotes.
e.g.
s1 <- 'hello'
s2 <- "world"
Of course, if you want to include double quotes inside a string literal defined using double quotes you need to escape (using backslash) the inner quotes, otherwise the R code parser won't be able to detect the end of the string correctly (the same holds for single quote).
e.g.
s1 <- "Hello, my name is \"John\""
If you print (using cat¹) this string on the console, or you write this string on a file you will get the actual "face" of the string, not the R literal representation, that is :
> cat("Hello, my name is \"John\"")
Hello, my name is "John"
The json parser, reads the actual "face" of the string, so, in your case json reads :
[{"id":"484","comment":"They call me "Bruce""}]
not (the R literal representation) :
"[{\"id\":\"484\",\"comment\":\"They call me \"Bruce\"\"}]"
That being said, also the json parser needs double-quotes escaping when you have quotes inside strings.
Hence, your string should be modified in this way :
[{"id":"484","comment":"They call me \"Bruce\""}]
If you simply modify your file by adding the backslashes you will be perfectly able to read the json.
Note that the corresponding R literal representation of that string would be :
"[{\"id\":\"484\",\"comment\":\"They call me \\\"Bruce\\\"\"}]"
in fact, this works :
> fromJSON("[{\"id\":\"484\",\"comment\":\"They call me \\\"Bruce\\\"\"}]")
id comment
1 484 They call me "Bruce"
¹
the default R print function (invoked also when you simply press ENTER on a value) returns the corresponding R string literal. If you want to print the actual string, you need to use print(quote=F,stringToPrint), or cat function.
EDIT (on #EngrStudent comment on the possibility to automatize quotes escaping) :
Json parser cannot do quotes escaping automatically.
I mean, try to put yourself in the computer's shoes and image you should parse this (unescaped) string as json: { "foo1" : " : "foo2" : "foo3" }
I see at least three possible escaping giving a valid json:
{ "foo1" : " : \"foo2\" : \"foo3" }
{ "foo1\" : " : "foo2\" : \"foo3" }
{ "foo1\" : \" : \"foo2" : "foo3" }
As you can see from this small example, escaping is really necessary to avoid ambiguities.
Maybe, if the string you want to escape has a really particular structure where you can recognize (without uncertainty) the double-quotes needing to be escaped, you can create your own automatic escaping procedure, but you need to start from scratch, because there's nothing built-in.

JSON.parse file input differ from parsing string literal

Im using nodejs to parse some JSON files and insert them into mongodb,the JSON in these files have invalid JSON characters like \n,\" etc ..
The thing that i dont understand is that if i tried to parse like :
console.log(JSON.parse('{"foo":"bar\n"}'))
i get
undefined:1
{"foo":"bar
but if i tried to parse the input from the file (The file has the same string {"foo":"bar\n"})like:
new lazy(fs.createReadStream("info.json"))
.lines
.forEach(function(line){
var line = line.toString();
console.log(JSON.parse(line));
}
);
every thing works fine , i want to know if this fine and its ok to parse the files i have, or i should replace all invalid JSON characters before i parse the files ,
and why is there a difference between the two.
Thanks
If you can read "\n" if your text file, then it's not an end of line but the \ character followed by a n.
\n in a JavaScript string literal adds an end of line and they're forbidden in JSON strings.
See json.org :
To put an end of line in a JSON string, you must escape it, which means you must escape the \ in a JavaScript string so that there's "\n" in the string received by JSON.parse :
console.log(JSON.parse('{"foo":"bar\\n"}'))
This would produce an object whose foo property value would contain an end of line :

f# split html by tags

I would like to parse an HTML document and print each of the paragraphs to a log file as an individual entry. So far I have:
let parseTextFile (path) =
let fileText = File.ReadAllText(path)
fileText.Split('<p>') |> Seq.iter (fun m -> logEmail(m))
But unfortunately for me string.Split does not do what I want here, it seems to exist to split a string by a single character delimiter. How can I split the file up using something more than a single character, it may be nice to have something more than just <p> as well because with just that I will have a </p> at the end of the paragraph. With a regex or some sort of complex matcher I could more specifically pick out everything between <p> tags.
Try using specific libraries for parsing html, for example HtmlAgilityPack.
As wmeyer said, you need to use a different overload of the .Split() method on strings. In fact, the code you posted won't even compile because '<p>' is not a string literal -- you need to use "<p>" instead (single quotes are for character literals).
Here's how to use the correct overload of .Split():
open System.IO
let parseTextFile path =
let fileText = File.ReadAllText path
fileText.Split ([| "<p>"; |], System.StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries)
|> Seq.iter logEmail
For a quick test in F# Interactive:
> "First paragraph<p>Second paragraph.<p><p>Third paragraph.<p>"
.Split ([| "<p>"; |], System.StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);;
val it : string [] =
[|"First paragraph"; "Second paragraph."; "Third paragraph."|]
Finally, as #ntr said -- you're much, much better off using a library like the HTML Agility Pack for parsing HTML. Their parsers are very robust and will save you a lot of trouble.