CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#jsonparsingjson.net
user2088807
user2088807

Reputation: 1408

Parse Json without property names to C#

I'm trying to parse to a C# object a string containing a JSON that looks like that : I know it's not really valid json but I can't choose it, it's sent by a device. That's why I've tried to replace the [] by {} to make it look like a valid object.

[2, "2", "text", {Object}]

I've created the following class:

public class MyClass
{
    [JsonProperty(Order = 0)]
    public int TypeRequest { get; set; }

    [JsonProperty(Order = 1)]
    public string UniqueID { get; set; }

    [JsonProperty(Order = 2)]
    public string Action { get; set; }

    [JsonProperty(Order = 3)]
    public JObject Payload { get; set; }

}

I want to parse the {Object} later (I need to know the "Action" property first because the object depends on the action).

So far I've done :

string userMessage = "[2, "2", "text", {Object}]"; 
if (userMessage.Length > 2)
{
     // We need to remove the first [ and the last ] to be able to parse into a json object
     StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder(userMessage);
     sb[0] = '{';
     sb[sb.Length - 1] = '}';
     userMessage = sb.ToString();
 }

 JavaScriptSerializer jsonSerializer = new JavaScriptSerializer();
 MyClass objectJSON = jsonSerializer.Deserialize<MyClass >(userMessage);

But it doesn't work I get the following exception:

Invalid object passed in, ':' or '}' expected. (3): {Object}}

I've also tried with JObject.Parse instead and I got:

Invalid JavaScript property identifier character: ,. Path '', line 1, position 2.

Do you know how to do it? I would like to avoid having to split my JSON by commas and have the cleanest way to do it.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 3757

Answers (1)

Andrei
Andrei

Reputation: 44680

It's not really a valid JSON because of {Object} so I removed it. You can technically do json.Replace("{Object}", "something else") to make it easier. Because you deal with different types in array, it may not be a one step process. Here is an idea for you:

var json = "[2, \"2\", \"text\"]";
var array = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<JArray>(json);

foreach (var item in array)
{
    switch (item.Type)
    {
        case JTokenType.Integer:
            // todo: your parsing code
            break;
        case JTokenType.String:
            break;
        // etc.
    }
}

I used JSON.NET library to parse JSON. You can install it using nuget:

Install-Package Newtonsoft.Json

If you can, I'd recommend you to fix the JSON source to provide you with a valid JSON that can be parsed to an object without use of low-level classes like JToken, JArray, JObject etc.

Upvotes: 3

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