jQuery.parseJSON not parsing if JSON string has items with the same name

Question

I am playing with the 1.4.1 jquery.parseJSON method and looks like it would be a good fit for my project which is iterating over a JSON string that is loaded from C#. However, the JSON that gets loaded is an entity object and they have generic collections inside of them and thus creates the same name in the JSON string. For example:

This works because theres only item with a name all to itself:

var obj = jQuery.parseJSON('{\"ItemID\":1014470}');
alert(obj.ItemID);

This works but only gets the last item in the JSON string:

var obj = jQuery.parseJSON('{\"ItemID\":1014470,\"ItemID\":134564879898798}');
alert(obj.ItemID);

So I thought separating the JSON string as follows would solve it:

var obj = jQuery.parseJSON('{\"ItemID\":1014470},{\"ItemID\":134564879898798}');

Which of course does nothing

I was thinking that you could do something like this:

jQuery.each(obj, function(){
     // get each ItemID ???
});

Is there a better way to do something like this?

Currently we use these ugly javascript arrays with lots and lots of looping methods, I was hoping jQuery could provide a cleaner way of iterating over a JSON string.

Answer 1

If you are willing to change the data format, a json structure like the one below will work for you.

[
    {
        "ItemID": 1014470
    },
    {
        "ItemID": 134564879898798
    }
]

It will build an array of objects that each have the ItemID property.

Only getting the last declaration of a property that's defined multiple times in one object is expected behavior, so you will need to use some sort of array.

Answer 2

To repeat items, you use an array. Either an array of objects:

[{"ItemID":1014470},{"ItemID":134564879898798}]

or an object that has an array as member:

{"ItemID":[1014470,134564879898798]}

The first one you can loop using:

$.each(arr, function(){
  alert(this.ItemID);
});

The second you can loop using:

$.each(obj.ItemID, function(){
  alert(this);
});