Unescaping data in mason/Perl and creating a Json out of it - json

Question

string s = "%7BparentAsin%3Aasin_1%2C+businessType%3A+%22AHS%22%2CrenderType%3ARenderAll%2Cconstraints%3A%5B%7Btype%3A+Delete%2CmutuallyInclusive%3Afalse%7D%5D%7D"
I want this to be converted into a JSON in Mason Language. (Mason is very similar to perl).
I am doing this and it is working partly:
URI::Escape::uri_unescape($ItemAssociationGroupData)
This is returning:
{parentAsin:asin_1,+businessType:+"AHS",renderType:RenderAll,constraints:[{type:+Delete,mutuallyInclusive:false}]}
Here I dont want the "+" signs and the final output should be a Json and not a String. Like this can be done online on this tool, but I want to do same in code.
https://www.url-encode-decode.com/
I have tried: JSON::XS::to_json && HTML::Entities.. n all but they are not working and returning undef values.
Any help here is appreciated

Answer 1

Just replace the + with spaces.
uri_unescape( $ItemAssociationGroupData =~ s/\+/ /rg )
That produces
{parentAsin:asin_1, businessType: "AHS",renderType:RenderAll,constraints:[{type: Delete,mutuallyInclusive:false}]}
But that string isn't JSON. The keys of objects must be string literals in JSON, and string literals must be quoted.
Cpanel::JSON::XS's allow_barekey option will make it accept unquoted keys, but no JSON parser is going to accept the other unquoted string literals (asin_1, RenderAll, Delete). Not even JavaScript would accept that.

Answer 2

I don't know where you're getting that string from, but it's not really very close to JSON.
!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use feature 'say';
use JSON;
use URI::Escape;
use Data::Dumper;
my $str = '%7BparentAsin%3Aasin_1%2C+businessType%3A+%22AHS%22%2CrenderType%3ARenderAll%2Cconstraints%3A%5B%7Btype%3A+Delete%2CmutuallyInclusive%3Afalse%7D%5D%7D';
my $json = uri_unescape($str);
say $json;
say Dumper decode_json($json);
We get this output:
{parentAsin:asin_1,+businessType:+"AHS",renderType:RenderAll,constraints:[{type:+Delete,mutuallyInclusive:false}]}
And then this error:
'"' expected, at character offset 1 (before "parentAsin:asin_1,+b...") at json_decode line 21.
That's caused by the keys in your objects not being in quoted strings. Ok, we can fix that. We'll also replace the '+' signs with spaces.
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use feature 'say';
use JSON;
use URI::Escape;
use Data::Dumper;
my $str = '%7BparentAsin%3Aasin_1%2C+businessType%3A+%22AHS%22%2CrenderType%3ARenderAll%2Cconstraints%3A%5B%7Btype%3A+Delete%2CmutuallyInclusive%3Afalse%7D%5D%7D';
# ADDED THIS LINE
$str =~ s/\+/ /g;
my $json = uri_unescape($str);
# ADDED THIS LINE
$json =~ s/(\w+?):/"$1":/g;
say $json;
say Dumper decode_json($json);
Now we get better output:
{"parentAsin":asin_1, "businessType": "AHS","renderType":RenderAll,"constraints":[{"type": Delete,"mutuallyInclusive":false}]}
But we still get an error:
malformed JSON string, neither tag, array, object, number, string or atom, at character offset 14 (before "asin_1,+"businessTyp...") at json_decode line 21.
This is because your values also need to be quoted strings. But fixing this is harder because some of your values are already quoted (e.g. "AHS") and some values don't need to be quoted (e.g. false).
So it's hard to know the best approach to take from here. My first instinct would be to go back to whatever is generating that original string and see if you can get the bugs fixed so you get a proper JSON string.