Extract JSON from text

Question

An AJAX call is returning a response text that includes a JSON string. I need to:

1. extract the JSON string
2. modify it
3. then reinsert it to updat

Answer 1

If the JSON is returned as part of an ajax response, why not use the browsers native JSON parsing (beware of gotchas)? Or jQuery JSON Parsing?

If the JSON is totally mangled up with the text, that really reeks of a design issue IMHO - if you can change it, I would strongly recommend doing so (i.e. return a single JSON object as the response, with the text as a property of the object).

If not, then using RegEx is going to be an absolute nightmare. JSON is naturally very flexible, and ensuring accurate parsing is going to be not only time-consuming, but just wasteful. I would probably put in content markers at the start/end and hope for the best. But you're going to be wide-open to validation errors etc.