Android JSON Parsing

Android JSON Parsing

JSON is the best alternative to XML for storing data in files. It is easy to parse and access data stored in JSON format. Previously i explained parsing XML and today i am going to discuess parsing JSON data with an example.

The JSON Structure

I am taking an example of following JSON which will give you list of contacts and each contact will have details like name, email, address, phone number ertc,

{
    "contacts": [
        {
                "id": "c200",
                "name": "dream",
                "email": "dream@gmail.com",
                "address": "xx-xx-xxxx,x - street, x - country",
                "gender" : "male",
                "phone": {
                    "mobile": "+91 0000000000",
                    "home": "00 000000",
                    "office": "00 000000"
                }
        },
        {
                "id": "c201",
                "name": "Johnny Depp",
                "email": "johnny_depp@gmail.com",
                "address": "xx-xx-xxxx,x - street, x - country",
                "gender" : "male",
                "phone": {
                    "mobile": "+91 0000000000",
                    "home": "00 000000",
                    "office": "00 000000"
                }
        },
        .
        .
        .
        .
  ]

The difference between [ and { - (Square brackets and Curly brackets)

If you observe normally JSON data will have square brackets and curly brackets. The difference between [ and { is, the square bracket represents starting of an JSONArray node whereas curly bracket represents JSONObject. While accessing these elements we need to call different methods to access these nodes.


Writing JSON Parser Class

In your project create a class file and name it as JSONParser.java. The parser class has a method which will make http request to get JSON data and returns a JSONObject.

JSONParser.java
package com.androidhive.jsonparsing;

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.io.InputStreamReader;
import java.io.UnsupportedEncodingException;

import org.apache.http.HttpEntity;
import org.apache.http.HttpResponse;
import org.apache.http.client.ClientProtocolException;
import org.apache.http.client.methods.HttpPost;
import org.apache.http.impl.client.DefaultHttpClient;
import org.json.JSONException;
import org.json.JSONObject;

import android.util.Log;

public class JSONParser {

    static InputStream is = null;
    static JSONObject jObj = null;
    static String json = "";

    // constructor
    public JSONParser() {

    }

    public JSONObject getJSONFromUrl(String url) {

        // Making HTTP request
        try {
            // defaultHttpClient
            DefaultHttpClient httpClient = new DefaultHttpClient();
            HttpPost httpPost = new HttpPost(url);

            HttpResponse httpResponse = httpClient.execute(httpPost);
            HttpEntity httpEntity = httpResponse.getEntity();
            is = httpEntity.getContent();        

        } catch (UnsupportedEncodingException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        } catch (ClientProtocolException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }

        try {
            BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(
                    is, "iso-8859-1"), 8);
            StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
            String line = null;
            while ((line = reader.readLine()) != null) {
                sb.append(line + "n");
            }
            is.close();
            json = sb.toString();
        } catch (Exception e) {
            Log.e("Buffer Error", "Error converting result " + e.toString());
        }

        // try parse the string to a JSON object
        try {
            jObj = new JSONObject(json);
        } catch (JSONException e) {
            Log.e("JSON Parser", "Error parsing data " + e.toString());
        }

        // return JSON String
        return jObj;

    }
}