I'm trying to parse a json but I have some difficulties with the data types and notably the AnyObject type + downcasting.
Let's consider the following json (it's an extract of a full json).
{ "weather":
[
{
"id":804,
"main":"Clouds",
"description":"overcast clouds",
"icon":"04d"
}
],
}
To me, the json can be described as follow :
- json: Dictionary of type [String: AnyObject] (or NSDictionary, so = [NSObject, AnyObject] in Xcode 6 b3)
- "weather": Array of type [AnyObject] (or NSArray)
- Dictionary of type [String: AnyObject] (or NSDictionary, so = [NSObject, AnyObject] in Xcode 6 b3)
My json is of type AnyObject! (I use JSONObjectWithData
to get the JSON from a URL).
I then want to access the weather Dictionary. Here is the code I wrote.
var localError: NSError?
var json: AnyObject! = NSJSONSerialization.JSONObjectWithData(data, options: NSJSONReadingOptions.MutableContainers, error: &localError)
if let dict = json as? [String: AnyObject] {
if let weatherDictionary = dict["weather"] as? [AnyObject] {
// Do stuff with the weatherDictionary
}
}
Here is the error I got
Playground execution failed: error: <EXPR>:28:56: error: '[AnyObject]' is not a subtype of '(String, AnyObject)'
if let weatherDictionary = dict["weather"] as? [AnyObject] {
I don't understand why dict["weather"] is compared to a subtype of (String, AnyObject) and not AnyObject.
I declared my dictionary as [String: AnyObject], so I i access a value using the String key, I should have an AnyObject, no ?
If I use NSDictionary instead of [String: AnyObject], it works.
If I use NSArray instead of [AnyObject], it works.
- The Xcode 6 beta 3 release notes tell that "NSDictionary* is now imported from Objective-C APIs as [NSObject : AnyObject].".
- And the Swift book: "When you bridge from an NSArray object to a Swift array, the resulting array is of type [AnyObject]."
EDIT
I forgot to force unwrapping the dict["weather"]!.
if let dict = json as? [String: AnyObject] {
println(dict)
if let weatherDictionary = dict["weather"]! as? [AnyObject] {
println("\nWeather dictionary:\n\n\(weatherDictionary)")
if let descriptionString = weatherDictionary[0]["description"]! as? String {
println("\nDescription of the weather is: \(descriptionString)")
}
}
}
Note that we should double check for the existence of the first Optional.
if let dict = json as? [String: AnyObject] {
for key in ["weather", "traffic"] {
if let dictValue = dict[key] {
if let subArray = dictValue as? [AnyObject] {
println(subArray[0])
}
} else {
println("Key '\(key)' not found")
}
}
}
This works fine for me in the playground and in the terminal using
env xcrun swift
UPDATED FOR SWIFT 4 AND CODABLE
Here is a Swift 4 example using the Codable protocol.
UPDATED FOR SWIFT 3.0
I have updated the code for Swift 3 and also showed how to wrap the parsed JSON into objects. Thanks for all the up votes!
-- Previous Answer --
Since I'm still getting up-votes for this answer, I figured I would revisit it for Swift 2.0:
The biggest difference is that the variable
json
is no longer an optional type and the do/try/catch syntax. I also went ahead and typedid
,main
, anddescription
.Using my library (https://github.com/isair/JSONHelper) you can do this with your json variable of type AnyObject:
Had your array not been under the key "weather", your code would have been just this:
Or if you have a json string in your hands you can just pass it as well, instead of creating a JSON dictionary from the string first. The only setup you need to do is writing a Weather class or struct:
Try:
With it you can go like this: