Gson: Parsing String[] - json

Question

I'm using Gson library to parse JSON objects. In particular, I've got a JSON like this:
{
"key": ["string1", "string2"]
}
and I would like to parse it in a simple String[], without building a specific object. I tried this way:
gson.fromJson(json, String[].class);
but I had an error: "Expected BEGIN_OBJECT but was BEGIN_ARRAY", I guess because of the presence of the key. Any ideas how should I fix it?

Answer 1

Create a class that has a key property that has type of String[] and deserialize to that.
public class Thing
{
private String[] key;
public String[] getKey() {
return key;
}
}
Thing thing = gson.fromJson(json, Thing.class);

Answer 2

Since tvanfosson answer is perfect, I should not add anything but in the comment you asked is it's possible to avoid creating the Thing class. Yes, it is but I think is more fragile. I'm going to show you how to do with this code:
String json = "{\"key\": [\"string1\", \"string2\"]}";
String mJson = json.replace("{\"key\":", "").replace("}","");
String[] strings = new Gson().fromJson(mJson, String[].class);
System.out.println(Arrays.asList(strings));
Of course this code runs without errors and avoids you additional classes, but think to what happens if there's some carriage return inside. It breaks, unless you user a regexp inside the replace invocation. At this point I prefer to add a class instead of thinking of right regexp and let Gson do the whole work.
I added this as response and not as comment to have enough space to explain myself, but this answer should not be taken as right response but instead as poor hack to use. It pays better to understand a bit more how Gson reasons.