How to convert arbitrary JSON into a usable structure in Java

Question

I\'m trying to use gson to convert this returned JSON into some kind of data structure such that I can extract useful data.

For Example:

http://search.twitte

Answer 1

Gson is a slick beast! Or at least it became so over the years that have passed since the question had been asked.

You can pass it an Object.class as a second parameter to the fromJson() method and it will parse your Json into a reasonable structure of LinkedTreeMaps and ArrayLists.

Object result = (new Gson()).fromJson(jsonString, Object.class)

More than that, you can really do partial parsing and leave loose ends at any level of your object structure by defining a certain field as Object!

Gson will then parse Json into your structure and your field of type Object will contain the above mentioned structure of LinkedTreeMaps and ArrayLists.

E.g., you may define a class

Person {
    String name;
    Object details;
}

(Imagine, you care mostly about the person's name but may want the details also somewhere. To log them, for instance.)

Then you can pass the following Json to the fromJson(input, Person.class) method as a first parameter

{ 
    "name": "Carlsson", 
    "details": {
        "address": "Stockholm",
        "phones": [
            "work": "233-322-233-322",
            "home": "none"
        ]
    }
}

The result will have the name field filled with "Carlsson" string and details field will contain a LinkedTreeMap with keys "address" and "phones", etc.