I’m trying to work with some json formatted data in C#, but, I’m having some problems determining the proper way to approach the problem. My issue is that the json formatted data will be in an unknown format (I know that sounds odd … please read on). Basically, the json formatted data will be some collection of name/value pairs where the values may or may not be arrays of nested name/value pairs. To make things more fun, the nesting of the name/value pair arrays can continue on ad infinitum.
For example: I might have some data that looks like…
{ “1” {
“1.1”: { “1.1.1”: “value1”, “1.1.2”: “value2”, “1.1.3”: “value3” },
“1.2”: “value4”,
“1.3”: { “1.3.1”:
{ “1.3.1.1”: “value5”, “1.3.1.2”: “value6” },
“1.3.1.2”: “value7”,
“1.3.1.3”: “value8”,
}
}
}
Unfortunately, I don’t know how much nesting is going to occur and technically I don’t know what names/value pairs will be present in any given message.
Is there any supported mechanism in C# that would enable me to easily parse this into a nested set of hastables?
I’d like to do something along the lines of (note this code is not 100% syntactically correct and would better be done via recursion … but it get’s the idea across).
Hashtable ht = [deserialize data method](jsonformattedstring);
foreach (Hashtable nested in ht)
{
If (nested.count > 1)
{
Foreach (hashtable next in nested)
…
}
}