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

For this specific issue (the empty indexes within the arrays from the JSON response) I did a regex replacement with a lookahead assertion. Considering that request contains the XMLHttpRequest:

request.responseText.replace(/,(?=,)/gm, ",\"\"")

This will turn ,, into ,"", and will also work in case there are more commas in sequence, so ,,, becomes ,"","",. You can use JSON.parse() afterwards.