How can I use Google GSON to deserialize a JSON array into a a Collection of a generic type? [duplicate]

Answer 1

The most generic type I can think of in Java is a Map to represent a JSON object and List> to represent an array of JSON objects.

It is very straight forward to parse this using the GSON library (I used version 2.2.4 at the time of writing):

import com.google.gson.Gson;

import java.util.List;
import java.util.Map;

public class Test {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String json = "{\"name\":\"a name\"}";
        Gson GSON = new Gson();
        Map parsed = GSON.fromJson(json, Map.class);
        System.out.println(parsed.get("name"));

        String jsonList = "[{\"name\":\"a name\"}, {\"name\":\"a name2\"}]";
        List> parsedList = GSON.fromJson(jsonList, List.class);
        for (Map parsedItem : parsedList) {
            System.out.println(parsedItem.get("name"));
        }
    }
}