Extracting content from a nested json - json

Question

I am trying to used the gson library to parse a json file.I want to get a list of names and URLs of all states within a JSON.I am not able to understand the structure of the json object and how to retrieve this data,since any structure i create is returning null values . The sample structure of the JSON is
{
"states" : {
"state53" : {
"name" : "state53",
"url" : "http://cv4a.org/veterans-group-calls-accountability-va-funds-boost/",
"candidateElements" : [ {
"top" : 202,
"left" : 58,
"xpath" : "/HTML[1]/BODY[1]/DIV[2]/DIV[1]/DIV[2]/DIV[1]/ARTICLE[1]/HEADER[1]/P[1]/A[1]",
"width" : 135,
"height" : 20
}, {
"top" : 1307,
"left" : 225,
"xpath" : "/HTML[1]/BODY[1]/DIV[2]/DIV[1]/DIV[2]/DIV[1]/OL[1]/LI[1]/ARTICLE[1]/HEADER[1]/TIME[1]/A[1]",
"width" : 191,
"height" : 22
}, {
"top" : 1374,
"left" : 912,
"xpath" : "/HTML[1]/BODY[1]/DIV[2]/DIV[1]/DIV[2]/DIV[1]/OL[1]/LI[1]/ARTICLE[1]/A[1]",
"width" : 78,
"height" : 38
}, {
"top" : 0,
"left" : 0,
"xpath" : "/HTML[1]/BODY[1]/DIV[2]/DIV[1]/DIV[2]/DIV[1]/SECTION[1]/DIV[1]/P[1]/A[1]",
"width" : 169,
"height" : 18
} ],
"fanIn" : 1,
"fanOut" : 3,
"id" : 53,
"failedEvents" : [ "xpath /HTML[1]/BODY[1]/DIV[2]/DIV[1]/DIV[2]/DIV[1]/SECTION[1]/DIV[1]/P[1]/A[1]" ]
},
"state9" : {
"name" : "state9",
"url" : "http://cv4a.org/blog/#",
"candidateElements" : [ ],
"fanIn" : 1,
"fanOut" : 0,
"id" : 9,
"failedEvents" : [ ]
},

Answer 1

public static void main(String[] args) {
JsonElement jsonElement = new JsonParser().parse(jsonString);
JsonObject statesObj = jsonElement.getAsJsonObject();
statesObj = statesObj.getAsJsonObject("states");
final Set<Map.Entry<String, JsonElement>> statesEntries = statesObj.entrySet();
for (Map.Entry<String, JsonElement> state : statesEntries) {
JsonObject stateObj = state.getValue().getAsJsonObject();
String name = stateObj.get("name").getAsString();
//....
}
}
Or you can create classes (like State, CandidateElement) with fields (name, url, e.t.c) and use auto serialization/deserialization. See documentation