Cocoa - Parse a JSON string

Question

I know that the web is full of examples about this, but I've tried everything, and I'm missing something. I want to parse a JSON string into a dicionary.

E have this response of the server:

{"type":"response", "action":"mkac", "result":"[{"Band":"Adele","Hits":422},{"Band":"Bryan Adams","Hits":93},{"Band":"Adai","Hits":30},{"Band":"Adamo","Hits":18},{"Band":"Adelle","Hits":15}]"}

And I make:

NSError *parseError = nil;
                        NSDictionary *outputDictionary = 
                        [NSJSONSerialization JSONObjectWithData: [output dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding]
                                                        options: NSJSONReadingMutableContainers
                                                          error: &parseError];
                        NSLog(@"server said: %@", [outputDictionary objectForKey:@"result"]);

But the outputDictionary allways gives me null.

Can anyone help me with that?

Thanks a lot.

Answer 1

Yes, your json is malformed. If you format it properly, you'll see why:

{
  "type":"response", 
  "action":"mkac", 
  "result":"[{"Band":"Adele","Hits":422},{"Band":"Bryan Adams","Hits":93},{"Band":"Adai","Hits":30},{"Band":"Adamo","Hits":18},{"Band":"Adelle","Hits":15}]"
}

You'll notice that the value for "result" starts with a " character, which means that the value is technically "[{". However after that, it comes across Band. Since Band isn't surrounded in double quotes (or preceded by a , or a }, etc), it generates a parse error. If you remove the double quote immediately before [{ and immediately after }], then it parses correctly:

{
  "type":"response", 
  "action":"mkac", 
  "result":[
    {
      "Band":"Adele",
      "Hits":422
    },
    {
      "Band":"Bryan Adams",
      "Hits":93
    },
    {
      "Band":"Adai",
      "Hits":30
    },
    {
      "Band":"Adamo",
      "Hits":18
    },
    {
      "Band":"Adelle",
      "Hits":15
    }
  ]
}

Answer 2

I figured out what happened. The json string was no valid, because of "[ that I had to replace with just [