CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railsrubyruby-on-rails-3xmlhttprequest
Sam Wilks
Sam Wilks

Reputation: 67

Getting data out of a JSON Response in Rails 3

So I am trying to pull tweets off of Twitter at put them into a rails app (Note because this is an assignment I can't use the Twitter Gem) and I am pretty confused. I can get the tweets I need in the form of a JSON string but I'm not sure where to go from there. I know that the Twitter API call I'm making returns a JSON array with a bunch of Tweet objects but I don't know how to get at the tweet objects. I tried JSON.parse but was still unable to get the required data out (I'm not sure what that returns). Here's the code I have so far, I've made it pretty clear with comments/strings what I'm trying for. I'm super new to Rails, so this may be way off for what I'm trying to do.

def get_tweets
require 'net/http'
uri = URI("http://search.twitter.com/search.json?q=%23bieber&src=typd")

http = Net::HTTP.new(uri.host, uri.port)
request = Net::HTTP::Get.new(uri.request_uri)
response = http.request(request)

case response
when Net::HTTPSuccess then #to get: text -> "text", date: "created_at", tweeted by: "from_user", profile img url: "profile_img_url"
  JSON.parse(response.body)
  # Here I need to loop through the JSON array and make n tweet objects with the indicated fields
  t = Tweet.new(:name => "JSON array item i with field from_user",  :text  "JSON array item i with field text", :date => "as before" ) 
  t.save
when Net::HTTPRedirection then
  location = response['location']
  warn "redirected to #{location}"
  fetch(location, limit - 1)
else
  response.value
end
end

Thanks!

Upvotes: 2

Views: 5661

Answers (1)

iwiznia
iwiznia

Reputation: 1679

The JSON.parse method returns a ruby hash or array representing the json object. In your case, the Json is parsed as a hash, with the "results" key (inside that you have your tweets), and some meta data: "max_id", "since_id", "refresh_url", etc. Refer to twitter documentation for a description on the fields returned. So again with your example it would be:

  parsed_response = JSON.parse(response.body)
  parsed_response["results"].each do |tweet|
    t = Tweet.new(:name => tweet["from_user_name"], :text => tweet["text"], :date => tweet["created_at"]) 
    t.save
  end

Upvotes: 6

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