Parsing Ruby JSON/hash to get single value - json

I am very new to ruby and could not find any examples of what I wanted to do though I am sure there is many out there.
I have a ruby json object that I need to get a certain value out of the first key pair in it. Below is the ruby/json and I want to take that and get the token value from it.
{"token"=>"<my token>", "dc"=>"test-dc"}
How do I get the token?

Ruby Hash objects and JSON "objects" might seem similar superficially but there's important differences.
Ruby's internal Hash looks like this when expressed with inspect:
{"token"=>"<my token>", "dc"=>"test-dc"}
Whereas JSON, which is a language-neutral data format inspired by JavaScript, looks like:
{"token": "<my token>", "dc": "test-dc"}
These are superficially similar, but the important difference is that if you have the former, not as a string but as a Hash, you can just use it:
hash["token"]
If you have the latter you'll need to parse it with something like JSON.load:
JSON.load('{"token": "<my token>", "dc": "test-dc"}')["token"]
Of course if you have Ruby and want JSON you can always dump it:
JSON.dump({"token"=>"<my token>", "dc"=>"test-dc"})
# => "{\"token\":\"<my token>\",\"dc\":\"test-dc\"}
Note that the arguments to dump are actual Ruby code and not a string like in the previous example. The output is a string, and as such, double-quotes need to be escaped with backslash. If you actually print this you'll see it without the extra escaping and it looks normal, that's just an artifact of how Ruby presents strings using inspect.

Related

Regex for replacing unnecessary quotation marks within a JSON object containing an array

I am currently trying to format a JSON object using LabVIEW and have ran into the issue where it adds additional quotation marks invalidating my JSON formatting. I have not found a way around this so I thought just formatting the string manually would be enough.
Here is the JSON object that I have:
{
"contentType":"application/json",
"content":{
"msgType":2,
"objects":"["cat","dog","bird"]",
"count":3
}
}
Here is the JSON object I want with the quotation marks removed.
{
"contentType":"application/json",
"content":{
"msgType":2,
"objects":["cat","dog","bird"],
"count":3
}
}
I am still not an expert with regex and using a regex tester I was only able to grab the "objects" and "count" fields but I would still feel I would have to utilize substrings to remove the quotation marks.
Example I am using (would use a "count" to find the start of the next field and work backwards from there)
"([objects]*)"
Additionally, all the other Regex I have been looking at removes all instances of quotation marks whereas I only need a specific area trimmed. Thus, I feel that a specific regex replace would be a much more elegant solution.
If there is a better way to go about this I am happy to hear any suggestions!
Your question suggests that the built-in LabVIEW JSON tools are insufficient for your use case.
The built-in library converts LabVIEW clusters to JSON in a one-shot approach. Bundle all your data into a cluster and then convert it to JSON.
When it comes to parsing JSON, you use the path input terminal and the default type terminals to control what data is parsed from a JSON string.
If you need to handle JSON in a manner similar to say JavaScript, I would recommend something like the JSONText Toolkit which is free to use (and distribute) under the BSD licence. This allows more complex and iterative building of JSON strings from LabVIEW types and has text-path style element access along with many more features.
The Output controls from both my examples are identical - although JSONText provides a handy Pretty Print vi.
After using a regex from one of the comments, I ended up with this regex which allowed me to match the array itself.
(\[(?:"[^"]*"|[^"])+\])
I was able to split the the JSON string into before match, match and after match and removed the quotation marks from the end of 'before match' and start of 'after match' and concatenated the strings again to form a new output.

Swift unable to preserve order in String made from JSON for hash verification

We receive a JSON object from network along with a hash value of the object. In order to verify the hash we need to turn that JSON into a string and then make a hash out of it while preserving the order of the elements in the way they are in the JSON.
Say we have:
[
{"site1":
{"url":"https://this.is.site.com/",
"logoutURL":"",
"loadStart":[],
"loadStop":[{"someMore":"smthelse"}],
"there's_more": ... }
},
{"site2":
....
}
]
The Android app is able to get same hash value, and while debugging it we fed same simple string into both algorithms and were able to get out same hash out of it.
The difference that is there happens because of the fact that dictionaries are unordered structure.
While debugging we see that just before feeding a string into a hash algorithm, the string looks like the original JSON, just without the indentations, which means it preserves the order of items in it (on Android that is):
[{"site1":{"url":"https://this.is.site.com/", ...
While doing this with many approaches by now I'm not able to achieve the same: string that I get is different in order and therefore results in a different hash. Is there a way to achieve this?
UPDATE
It appears the problem is slightly different - thanks to #Rob Napier's answer below: I need a hash of only a part of incoming string (that has JSON in it), which means for getting that part I need to first parse it into JSON or struct, and after that - while getting the string value of it - the order of items is lost.
Using JSONSerialization and JSONDecoder (which uses JSONSerialization), it's not possible to reproduce the input data. But this isn't needed. What you're receiving is a string in the first place (as an NSData). Just don't get rid of it. You can parse the data into JSON without throwing away the data.
It is possible to create JSON parsers from scratch in Swift that maintain round-trip support (I have a sketch of such a thing at RNJSON). JSON isn't really that hard to parse. But what you're describing is a hash of "the thing you received." Not a hash of "the re-serialized JSON."

Prevent parsing a JSON node with common-lisp YASON library

I am using the Yason library in common-lisp, I want to parse a json string but would like the parser to keep one a its node unparsed.
Typically with an example like that:
{
"metadata1" : "mydata1",
"metadata2" : "mydata2",
"payload" : {...my long payload object},
"otherNodesToParse" : {...}
}
How can I set the yason parser to parse my json but skip the payload node and keep it as a string in the json format.
Use: let's say I just want the envelope data (everything that's not the payload), and to forward the payload as-is (as json string) to another system.
If I parse the whole json (so including payload) and then re-encode the payload to json, it is inefficient. The payload size could also be pretty big.
How do you know where the end of the payload object is in the stream? You do so by parsing the stream: if you don't parse the stream you simply can't know where the end of the object is: that's the nature of JSON's syntax (as it is the nature of CL's default syntax). For instance the only way you can know the difference between where to continue after
{x:1}
and after
{x:1.2}
is by parsing the two things.
So you must necessarily parse the whole thing.
So the answer to your question is: you can't do this.
You could (but not, I think, with YASON) decide that you did not want to build an object as a result of the parse. And perhaps, if the stream you are parsing corresponds to something with random access like a string or a file, you could note the start and end positions in the stream to later extract a string from it corresponding to the unparsed data (or you could perhaps build it up as you go).
It looks as if some or all of this might be possible with CL-JSON, but you'd have to work at it.
Unless the objects you are reading are vast the benefit of this seems questionable-to-none. If you really do want to do something like this efficiently you need a serialisation scheme which tells you how long things are.

Are you able to subtract in JSON?

Here is my JSON code.
{
"user_email": "{User.Email}",
"activity_date": "{Lead.LastAction.Date}",
"record_id": "{Lead.Id}-{Lead.LastAction.Date}",
"action_type": "{Lead.LastAction}",
"milestone": "{Lead.Milestone}",
"date_added": "{Lead.Date}"
}
Is it possible to add calculations in the code?
For example, can I add a line where the date_added is subtracted from activity_date?
No: JSON is a way to transport JS Objects.
You can do that while you format the JSON in your native language ( for example in PHP or JS serverside), basically creating the JSON object with the result of the calculation.
In JSON just by itself you cannot do that, it's just a data format, it's totally passive, like a text file. (If you happen to use JSONP, then the story would be a bit different, it might be possible, but using JSONP to do such things would step into area of 'hack/exploit' and it probably should not be used in that way:) )
However, I see you are using not only JSON - there is some extra markup like {User.Email}. This is totally outside JSON spec so clearly you are using some form text-templating engine. These can be quite intelligent at times. Check that path, see which one you are using, see what are its features, maybe you can write a custom function or expression to do that subtraction for you. Maybe, just maybe, it's as easy as
"inactivity_period": "{Lead.LastAction.Date - Lead.Date}"
or
"inactivity_period": "{myFunctionThatIWrote(Lead.LastAction.Date, Lead.Date)}"
but that all depends on the templating engine.

Using regex to extract data from structured data

The problem I'm facing here is that I have a blob of text which contains structured data (in the form of a JSON payload) and I'm interested in extracting the value of one of the keys for a specific JSON instance, picture the structured data inside as the following:
"Item 1": {"key1":"item1_key1_value", "key2":"item1_key2_value", "key3":"item1_key3_value"}, "Item 2": {"key1":"item2_key1_value", "key2":"item2_key2_value", "key3":"item2_key3_value"}
What I would like to use is use regex to grab item1_key2_value for instance. The keys all have the same name but the items are different. So I know which key for which Item I need but am not quite sure of the regex to retrieve that value. I've tried a few approaches to some basic matching but was wondering if any other more experienced regex users could direct me a bit here and explain what I'm doing wrong
1(.)(?=item1_key2_value.) will match a chunk of data from here but I'm not sure of the best way to reduce it to the value that I need.
The regex syntax for JSON is clearly specified at http://www.json.org. If you scroll down a little to where it says "A string is a sequence of", you will find the proper string structure.
Assuming the string follows the correct JSON structure, you could use
"key2"\s*:\s*"((\\.|[^\\"])*)"
where \s means whitespace and * means 0 or more times. \\ means a slosh (backslash) character and can be followed by . (any character). If it does not encounter a slosh, then it instead looks for [^\\"], which means not slosh nor quote.
If you want to be a little more strict to the exact JSON form, you could try
"key2"\s*:\s*"((\\["\\/bfnrtu]|[^\\"])*)"
which you can see follows the string form on the webpage more closely.