How to convert a JSON string to a JSON string with a different structure

Question

I am building an application where data is retrieved from a third party system as a JSON string. I need to convert this JSON string to another JSON string with a different structure such that it can be used with pre-existing functions defined in a internal Javascript library.

Ideally I want to be able to perform this conversion on the client machine using Javascript.

I have looked at JSONT as a means of achieving this but that project does not appear to be actively maintained:

http://goessner.net/articles/jsont/

Is there a de facto way of achieving this? Or do I have to roll my own mapping code?

My apologies this appears to be a duplicate of this question: stackoverflow.com/questions/2514795/convert-json-structure From the accepted answer it appears there is no "clever" way to do this so it looks like I have to roll my own converter code in Javscript as per the example given in the answer above. — Troup
– Troup, Commented Jan 12, 2013 at 1:08
Array.prototype.map is pretty clever. See my answer, if you really want JSON at the end, you'd just need to call JSON.stringify on the processed array — Ruan Mendes
– Ruan Mendes, Commented Jan 12, 2013 at 1:12
Yes it does look a good enhancement to the answer given in the thread above. Thanks for this. — Troup
– Troup, Commented Jan 12, 2013 at 1:26

Community · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-23 11:56:44Z

2

You shouldn't be passing JSON into an internal JavaScript library. You should parse the JSON into a JS object, then iterate over it, transforming it into the new format

Example

var json = '[{"a": 1:, "b": 2}, {"a": 4:, "b": 5}]';
var jsObj = JSON.parse(json);
// Transform property a into aa and property b into bb
var transformed = jsObj.map(function(obj){
    return {
       aa: obj.a,
       bb: obj.b
    }
});

// transformed = [{aa:1, bb:2},{aa:4, bb:5}]

If you really want JSON you'd just call JSON.stringify(transformed)

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Array/map

Here's another answer with an even more complicated transformation How to make a jquery Datatable array out of standard json?

edited May 23, 2017 at 11:56

CommunityBot

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answered Jan 12, 2013 at 1:07

Ruan Mendes

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pjmorse · Accepted Answer · 2013-01-12 01:06:31Z

1

From what I can tell from the home page, the JSONT project is about transforming JSON into entirely different formats anyway (i.e. JSON => HTML).

It's going to be a lot simpler to write your own mapping code, possibly just as a from_json() method on the object you're creating (so YourSpecialObject.from_json(input); returns an instance of that object generated from the JSON data).

From your question, I'm not sure if this fits your use case, but hopefully someone else will have a better answer soon.

answered Jan 12, 2013 at 1:06

pjmorse

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Grogs · Accepted Answer · 2013-01-12 01:15:23Z

1

Another option is using XSLT. As there are SAX readers and writers for JSON, you can write happily use XSLT with JSON. There's no horrific JSON to XML and back conversion needs to go on. See: http://www.gerixsoft.com/blog/json/xslt4json

I can definitely see the irony in using a XML based language to tranform JSON - but it seems like a good option.

Otherwise you're probably best of writing your own mapping code.

answered Jan 12, 2013 at 1:15

Grogs

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2 Comments

Ruan Mendes Over a year ago

I hate XSLT, please let's not start using it for JSON

Troup Over a year ago

Thanks for providing an alternative approach. I'm not really a fan of XSLT either. Programming in XML is just so unwieldy. I'll keep it in mind though as you never know where alternatives prove valuable.

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