Android JSON Parser Example

The process of parsing JSON in Android is pretty simple, thankfully. We'll be using JSONObject for all the parsing goodness - there are also some other JSON classes, but we'll just go through the basic ones to give you a general idea of how it works.

The first thing we will do is setup our JSON string, which we'll end up parsing.

String jsonStr = '{"menu": {' +
		    '"id": "file",' +
		    '"value": "File",' +
		    '"popup": {' +
		      '"menuitem": [' +
		        '{"value": "New", "onclick": "CreateNewDoc()"},' +
		        '{"value": "Open", "onclick": "OpenDoc()"},' +
		        '{"value": "Close", "onclick": "CloseDoc()"}' +
		      ']' +
		    '}' +
		  '}}';

That JSON string is actually from http://json.org/example.html. It was the best one I could find for this given example.

Now that we have that in place, lets start using JSONObject. You will need the following import for this to work: import org.json.JSONObject;

JSONObject jsonObj = new JSONObject(jsonStr);

With that instantiated, we can do the following to retreive different pieces of data from the JSON string - you will also need the following import for JSONArray: import org.json.JSONArray; and import android.util.Log; for Log.

// grabbing the menu object
JSONObject menu = jsonObj.getJSONObject("menu");

// these 2 are strings
String id = menu.getString("id");
String value = menu.getString("value");

// the popop is another JSON object
JSONObject popup = menu.getJSONObject("popup");

// using JSONArray to grab the menuitems from under popop
JSONArray menuitemArr = popupObject.getJSONArray("menuitem"); 

// lets loop through the JSONArray and get all the items
for (int i = 0; i < menuitemArr.length(); i++) {
	// printing the values to the logcat
	Log.v(menuitemArr.getJSONObject(i).getString("value").toString());
	Log.v(menuitemArr.getJSONObject(i).getString("onclick").toString());
}