Parsing non-standard JSON

Question

Anyone know what type of JSON (if even that!) the following code is? I'm retrieving this from the HTML of a website. I'm trying to parse it in C# with a JSON parser, but I'm having to do lots of preparatory editing to format it as 'valid' JSON according to JSONLint. For example, the names of the variables should all have double quotes rather than having no quotes at all.

{
status: 'A',
displayed: 'Y',
start_time: '2010-11-2600: 00: 00',
start_time_xls: {
    en: '26thofNov201000: 00am',
    es: '26Nov201000: 00am'
},
suspend_at: '2010-11-2619: 57: 59',
is_off: 'Y',
score_home: '',
score_away: '',
bids_status: '',
period_id: '',
curr_period_start_time: '',
score_extra_info: '',
ev_id: 2257335,
blurb: '',
last_mkts_of_day: false,
follow_hcap_mkt: 10999896
}

This will always have the same format and I'd love to just parse it straight to an object in C# or java.

Answer 1

JSON requires that all names be in double quotes, so this is not valid JSON. This is a valid Javascript object. For JSON format questions go here: http://json.org/

It's not totally clear where you want to do this conversion to JSON, but in Javascript you can use window.JSON.stringify to convert it to JSON.

Demo: http://jsfiddle.net/ThinkingStiff/3xZD8/

var object = {
    names: {
        en: 'VirtualMarket-2MinuteLevel',
        es: 'VirtualMarket-2MinuteLevel'
    },
    status: 'A',
    displayed: 'Y',
    start_time: '2010-11-2600: 00: 00',
    start_time_xls: {
        en: '26thofNov201000: 00am',
        es: '26Nov201000: 00am'
    },
    suspend_at: '2010-11-2619: 57: 59',
    is_off: 'Y',
    score_home: '',
    score_away: '',
    bids_status: '',
    period_id: '',
    curr_period_start_time: '',
    score_extra_info: '',
    ev_id: 2257335,
    blurb: '',
    last_mkts_of_day: false,
    follow_hcap_mkt: 10999896
    },
    json = window.JSON.stringify( object );

Answer 2

You can use Json.Net to parse your input string. You can even make use of dynamic as below with the help of this extension class (Tested with your string)

dynamic obj = JsonUtils.JsonObject.GetDynamicJsonObject(jsonstr);
Console.WriteLine(obj.names.en);
Console.WriteLine(obj.status);
Console.WriteLine(obj.start_time_xls.en);
Console.WriteLine(obj.suspend_at);

With pure Json.Net

JObject jObj =  (JObject)JsonConvert.DeserializeObject(json3);
Console.WriteLine(jObj["names"]["en"]);
Console.WriteLine(jObj["status"]);
Console.WriteLine(jObj["start_time_xls"]["en"]);
Console.WriteLine(jObj["suspend_at"]);

Answer 3

Whether or not (I vote “not”) it's valid:

• Read in the string;
• s {^\s*([a-z0-9_]+)\:} {"\1":} g

seems to work for this data set, and I'll bet that they're just strcatting the output at you, so it's probably safe for the time being.