How to parse nested JSON data structure

Question

In a Windows Phone app I need to parse JSON data. I am able to get the values for keys which aren't nested. But if the JSON has arrays inside arrays, then how do I extract values from the JSON file?

In the past what I did was parse the JSON into a JArray object, then from the JToken I got the value of a specified string key.

In the JSON below, people has men and women, and men itself has many men with different IDs. So if I have this complete thing as a JSON string, how do I print the value of the ID of a particular man? I could have converted into JArray and access indexed values if there were no nested arrays here, but how to do it now?

Here is my JSON:

{
    "people": [
        {
            "men": [
                {
                    "id": 0,
                    "name": "alex",
                    "age": 25
                },
                {
                    "id": 1,
                    "name": "bob",
                    "age": 26
                },
                {
                    "id": 2,
                    "name": "charlie",
                    "age": 27
                }
            ]
        },
        {
            "women": [
                {
                    "id": 0,
                    "name": "alexys",
                    "age": 25
                },
                {
                    "id": 1,
                    "name": "bethany",
                    "age": 26
                },
                {
                    "id": 2,
                    "name": "catherine",
                    "age": 27
                }
            ]
        }
    ]
}

Are you using Newtonsoft.Json? There doesn't seem to be anything tricky here; without code, it's difficult to tell where you're going wrong. — Adrian Wragg
– Adrian Wragg, Commented Nov 18, 2014 at 11:00

Brian Rogers · Accepted Answer · 2014-11-19 23:48:56Z

14

From the top-level JToken, you can use SelectToken() to navigate to the JArray that has the data you are interested in:

JToken token = JToken.Parse(json);
JArray men = (JArray)token.SelectToken("people[0].men");

From there you can process the JArray as you normally would:

foreach (JToken m in men)
{
    Console.WriteLine("id: " + m["id"]);
    Console.WriteLine("name: " + m["name"]);
    Console.WriteLine("age: " + m["age"]);
    Console.WriteLine();
}

Same thing for the women array, except the SelectToken() path would be people[1].women.

DEMO: https://dotnetfiddle.net/7BoiUO

answered Nov 19, 2014 at 23:48

Brian Rogers

130k31 gold badges315 silver badges315 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

2 Comments

Abhishek Over a year ago

This was the most helpful parsing technique I got :) Thanks mate

wueli Over a year ago

Same here. You are a savior! So far, this is the only way to "lazily" parse JSONs in C# that worked for me.

Speederer · Accepted Answer · 2014-11-18 11:29:28Z

2

Use the http://json2csharp.com/ It generates the classes. I can't copy it, because you put here as a picture, not text. For the array you have to create other class. In your case you will have a People class that contains Men[] and Women[] arrays. The Men and Women classes contain an another array, which contains the Id, Name, Age. I develop a similar app, and I use the Newtonsoft Json. It works perfectly with the arrays as well.

answered Nov 18, 2014 at 11:29

Speederer

3715 silver badges14 bronze badges

1 Comment

Lonefish Over a year ago

Handy little site!

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 11:54:09Z

1

Use Json.net

You can add it via nuget. Here's a good guide to nested json parsing

edited May 23, 2017 at 11:54

CommunityBot

11 silver badge

answered Nov 19, 2014 at 16:48

Shivangi Gupta

8748 silver badges21 bronze badges

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

How to parse nested JSON data structure

3 Answers 3

2 Comments

1 Comment

Comments

Your Answer

Linked

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

3 Answers 3

2 Comments

1 Comment

Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Linked

Related