Debunking the myths about parsing JSON in Swift

Wait... who told you I was writing that book? Just wait till you read next week's article: "Debunking the myths about networking in Swift"

True. Although the Android JsonReader class does force you to write your own parser (it is itself merely a lexer). This is really inelegant.

What I'd really like is a way to write my POD types as normal:

  class Foo {
    int bar;
    String baz;
    ArrayList<String> blah;
    ArrayList<Xyz> xyzs;
  }

  class Xyz
  {
    String name;
    int value;
  }

And then just write this to parse it all.

  ...
  Parser<Foo> p = new Parser<Foo>();
  Foo f;
  try {
    f = gp.parse(input);
  } catch (JsonParseException e) {
    ...
  }

I'd be willing to accept having to annotate some of the fields, (but other than that, this should be possible to do).

It's not if you use a language that comes with its own JSON parser.

I don't know why anyone would bother writing their own, though.

If you're talking about either the bad (pyramid of doom) code in Myth #1 - or the good code there, then it is indeed protecting against null values in the JSON. When you try to cast with `as? String`, it returns nil when there's a null value in the JSON and the code in the `if` block is skipped (and the `else` block is executed if one exists).