The json module that ships with Ruby is something I use a lot in web app
APIs. When a request comes in as a string of JSON, I use JSON.parse to turn
it into a hash. That's because a hash is much easier to work with than a string
representation of some JSON data.
> require 'json'
=> true
> data = JSON.parse('{"name": "Josh", "city": "Chicago"}')
=> {"name"=>"Josh", "city"=>"Chicago"}
> data["name"]
=> "Josh"The hash access syntax can sometimes get to be clunky. JSON.parse is flexible
enough that it can do more than turn a JSON string into a hash. It can turn it
into any object that plays along. OpenStruct is a great example of this.
To tell JSON.parse to use a class other than Hash, include the
object_class
option.
> json_str = '{"name": "Josh", "city": "Chicago"}'
=> "{\"name\": \"Josh\", \"city\": \"Chicago\"}"
> data = JSON.parse(json_str, object_class: OpenStruct)
=> #<OpenStruct name="Josh", city="Chicago">
> data.name
=> "Josh"Because of how OpenStruct objects work, we can use method notation to access
the fields parsed from the JSON string.