“Expected BEGIN_OBJECT but was STRING at line 1 column 1”

Question

I have this method:

public static Object parseStringToObject(String json) {
    String Object = json;
    Gson gson = new Gson();
    Object objects = gson.f         


        

Answer 1

I had a similar problem recently and found an interesting solution. Basically I needed to deserialize following nested JSON String into my POJO:

"{\"restaurant\":{\"id\":\"abc-012\",\"name\":\"good restaurant\",\"foodType\":\"American\",\"phoneNumber\":\"123-456-7890\",\"currency\":\"USD\",\"website\":\"website.com\",\"location\":{\"address\":{\"street\":\" Good Street\",\"city\":\"Good City\",\"state\":\"CA\",\"country\":\"USA\",\"postalCode\":\"12345\"},\"coordinates\":{\"latitude\":\"00.7904692\",\"longitude\":\"-000.4047208\"}},\"restaurantUser\":{\"firstName\":\"test\",\"lastName\":\"test\",\"email\":\"test@test.com\",\"title\":\"server\",\"phone\":\"0000000000\"}}}"

I ended up using regex to remove the open quotes from beginning and the end of JSON and then used apache.commons unescapeJava() method to unescape it. Basically passed the unclean JSON into following method to get back a cleansed one:

private String removeQuotesAndUnescape(String uncleanJson) {
    String noQuotes = uncleanJson.replaceAll("^\"|\"$", "");

    return StringEscapeUtils.unescapeJava(noQuotes);
}

then used Google GSON to parse it into my own Object:

MyObject myObject = new.Gson().fromJson(this.removeQuotesAndUnescape(uncleanJson));