Parsing JSON response in Swift/iOS - json

Question

I have the following JSON.
[{"chatId":"1","user1_id":"1212","user2_id":"8543211123","user1_name":"dave","user2_name":"daveee","user1_profile_pic":"http:\/\/graph.facebook.com\/1212\/picture?type=large","user2_profile_pic":"https:\/\/scontent-waw1-1.xx.fbcdn.net\/v\/t1.0-9\/1212.jpg?oh=c288ac7b31a61aee751e8ddafb05e78a&oe=57DC702E","message":{"1":{"message_id":"24242241","sender":"1212","chatId":"1","text":"hello i am","timestamp":"2016-05-24 17:13:08"},"2":{"message_id":"421421","sender":"1212","chatId":"1","text":"great","timestamp":"2016-05-24 17:15:08"}}},{"chatId":"2","user1_id":"23413524635","user2_id":"1212","user1_name":"Leo","user2_name":"dave","user1_profile_pic":"https:\/\/scontent-fra3-1.xx.fbcdn.net\/v\/l\/t1.0-1\/1212.jpg?oh=1212&oe=579AE3AE","user2_profile_pic":"http:\/\/graph.facebook.com\/1212\/picture?type=large","message":{"1":{"message_id":"21321213","sender":"1212","chatId":"2","text":"yes, hi","timestamp":"2016-05-25 15:46:57"}}}]
I want to loop through the message and for each counter, extract the values. This is my code:
for anItem in jsonArray as! [Dictionary<String, AnyObject>]
var chat_messages : [Message]? = nil
var count_messages = 0;
if let dataArray = anItem["message"] as? [Int : Dictionary<String, AnyObject> ] {
for onemessage in dataArray as! [Dictionary<String, AnyObject>] {
let curr_message = Message()
if let messageid = onemessage["message_id"] as? String {
curr_message.id = messageid
}
if let messagedate = onemessage["timestamp"] as? NSDate {
curr_message.date = messagedate
}
if let messagesender = onemessage["sender"] as? String {
curr_message.sender = messagesender
}
if let messagetext = onemessage["text"] as? String {
curr_message.text = messagetext
}
chat_messages![count_messages] = curr_message
count_messages = count_messages + 1
}
}
The problem is that the line if let dataArray = anItem["message"] as? [Int : Dictionary<String, AnyObject> ] { always fails and the if condition is never entered.

Answer 1

If you are using NSJSONSerialization, then every dictionary is of the type: [String : AnyObject]. So this line:
if let dataArray = anItem["message"] as? [Int : Dictionary<String, AnyObject> ] {
should be:
if let dataArray = anItem["message"] as? [String : AnyObject] {
And to loop through the message dictionaries inside dataArray you could replace:
for onemessage in dataArray as! [Dictionary<String, AnyObject>] {
with:
for (_, messageDictionary) in dataArray {
if let onemessage = messageDictionary as? [String : AnyObject] {
and the rest of your code to get the various values out of the onemessage dictionary should work as you have it written now, except that this line will crash:
chat_messages![count_messages] = curr_message
Because you are forced unwrapping chat_messages, which you initialized as nil:
var chat_messages : [Message]? = nil
instead of as an empty array:
var chat_messages = [Message]()