Issues parsing some JSON Data - Swift 5 - json

Question

I think this will be simple I assume I'm just missing something about JSON structure here. I have some code that pulls down some data from an API handle to get a list of country names:
https://restcountries.eu/rest/v2/all?fields=name
Here is a sample of the API data though please feel free to view it using the link above:
[{"name":"Afghanistan"},{"name":"Åland Islands"},{"name":"Albania"},{"name":"Algeria"},{"name":"American Samoa"},{"name":"Andorra"},{"name":"Angola"},{"name":"Anguilla"},{"name":"Antarctica"},{"name":"Antigua and Barbuda"},{"name":"Argentina"}
I created this struct to hold the data
struct CountryList: Codable {
public let country: [Country]
}
struct Country: Codable {
public let name: String
}
I have these two functions that create the URLRequest and then grab the data and return it via a completion handler:
private func setupApiUrlRequest(apiURL: String) throws -> URLRequest {
let urlString = apiURL
guard let url = URL(string: urlString) else {
print("Error setting up URL")
throw CountriesError.invalidURLString
}
var request = URLRequest(url: url)
request.httpMethod = "GET"
return request
}
func getCountries(completion: #escaping (Country?, URLResponse?, Error?) -> Void) {
if let request = try? setupApiUrlRequest(apiURL: "https://restcountries.eu/rest/v2/all?fields=name") {
URLSession.shared.dataTask(with: request) { data,response,error in
guard let data = data else {
completion(nil, response, error)
return
}
do {
let decoder = JSONDecoder()
let downloadedCountries = try decoder.decode(Country.self, from: data)
completion(downloadedCountries, response, nil)
} catch {
print(error.localizedDescription)
completion(nil, response, error)
}
}.resume()
}
}
This gives me an error:
The data couldn’t be read because it isn’t in the correct format.
So it seems like my Struct is not correct somehow but I am just not sure how. Can anyone offer any guidance? I have a few other functions using almost identical code that grab API JSON Data and decode it into structs... just missing something here.

Answer 1

The JSON you've provided is not in the correct format.
Valid JSON:
[{"name":"Afghanistan"},{"name":"Åland Islands"},{"name":"Albania"},{"name":"Algeria"},{"name":"American Samoa"},{"name":"Andorra"},{"name":"Angola"},{"name":"Anguilla"},{"name":"Antarctica"},{"name":"Antigua and Barbuda"},{"name":"Argentina"}]
You need to use the [Country].self instead of just Country.self while parsing, i.e.
do {
let downloadedCountries = try JSONDecoder().decode([Country].self, from: data)
print(downloadedCountries)
} catch {
print(error)
}
Also, there is not requirement of struct CountryList. You can remove that.