[java] Parsing JSON Object in Java

1.) Create an arraylist of appropriate type, in this case i.e String

2.) Create a JSONObject while passing your string to JSONObject constructor as input

• As JSONObject notation is represented by braces i.e {}
• Where as JSONArray notation is represented by square brackets i.e []

3.) Retrieve JSONArray from JSONObject (created at 2nd step) using "interests" as index.

4.) Traverse JASONArray using loops upto the length of array provided by length() function

5.) Retrieve your JSONObjects from JSONArray using getJSONObject(index) function

6.) Fetch the data from JSONObject using index '"interestKey"'.

Note : JSON parsing uses the escape sequence for special nested characters if the json response (usually from other JSON response APIs) contains quotes (") like this

`"{"key":"value"}"`

should be like this

`"{\"key\":\"value\"}"`

so you can use JSONParser to achieve escaped sequence format for safety as

JSONParser parser = new JSONParser();
JSONObject json = (JSONObject) parser.parse(inputString);

Code :

JSONParser parser = new JSONParser();
String response = "{interests : [{interestKey:Dogs}, {interestKey:Cats}]}";

JSONObject jsonObj = (JSONObject) parser.parse(response);

or

JSONObject jsonObj = new JSONObject("{interests : [{interestKey:Dogs}, {interestKey:Cats}]}");

List<String> interestList = new ArrayList<String>();

JSONArray jsonArray = jsonObj.getJSONArray("interests");

for(int i = 0 ; i < jsonArray.length() ; i++){
    interestList.add(jsonArray.getJSONObject(i).optString("interestKey"));
}

Note : Sometime you may see some exceptions when the values are not available in appropriate type or is there is no mapping key so in those cases when you are not sure about the presence of value so use optString, optInt, optBoolean etc which will simply return the default value if it is not present and even try to convert value to int if it is of string type and vice-versa so Simply No null or NumberFormat exceptions at all in case of missing key or value

From docs

Get an optional string associated with a key. It returns the defaultValue if there is no such key.

 public String optString(String key, String defaultValue) {

  String missingKeyValue = json_data.optString("status","N/A");
  // note there is no such key as "status" in response
  // will return "N/A" if no key found 

or To get empty string i.e "" if no key found then simply use

  String missingKeyValue = json_data.optString("status");
  // will return "" if no key found where "" is an empty string

Further reference to study

• How to convert String to JSONObject in Java
• Convert one array list item into multiple Items