Parsing malformed JSON with Javascript

Question

I want to parse this content using Javascript. The data looks like this:

{\"ss\":[[\"Thu\",\"7:00\",\"Final\",,\"BAL\",\"19\",\"ATL\",\"20\",,,\"56808\",,\"PRE

Answer 1

Let's assume you already have a valid JSON String (jsonString) to parse. (If you don't know how to retrieve a String to parse using XMLHttpRequest from the given url you will have to look into that first.)

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With plain JavaScript you will have to add Douglas Crockford's JSON library (or something similar) in order to provide a parsing Function if there is no native implementation:

var json = json_parse(jsonString) ;

• link

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With a JavaScript library like jQuery this would be

var json = $.parseJSON(jsonString) ;

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Now, traversing the resultant JSON Object is a whole other issue, because you will have to know its structure before you can retrieve specific data. In this particular case -- if it was indeed well formed -- you would have to do the following:

var data = json.ss ;

     for(var i = 0 ; i < data.length ; i++) {

          var entry = data[i] ;

          var day = entry[0] ; //!! the Arrays seem to have a format where the first entry always contains the data and so forth...
          /* ... */

          // then do something with the data bits

     }