Regex for parsing single key: values out of JSON in Javascript

Question

I\'m trying to see if it\'s possible to lookup individual keys out of a JSON string in Javascript and return it\'s Value with Re

Answer 1

First, stringify the JSON object. Then, you need to store the starts and lengths of the matched substrings. For example:

"matched".search("ch") // yields 3

For a JSON string, this works exactly the same (unless you are searching explicitly for commas and curly brackets in which case I'd recommend some prior transform of your JSON object before performing regex (i.e. think :, {, }).

Next, you need to reconstruct the JSON object. The algorithm I authored does this by detecting JSON syntax by recursively going backwards from the match index. For instance, the pseudo code might look as follows:

find the next key preceding the match index, call this theKey
then find the number of all occurrences of this key preceding theKey, call this theNumber
using the number of occurrences of all keys with same name as theKey up to position of theKey, traverse the object until keys named theKey has been discovered theNumber times
return this object called parentChain

With this information, it is possible to use regex to filter a JSON object to return the key, the value, and the parent object chain.

You can see the library and code I authored at http://json.spiritway.co/

Answer 2

I would strongly discourage you from doing this. JSON is not a regular language as clearly stated here: https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/3987/is-json-a-regular-language

To quote from the above post:

For example, consider an array of arrays of arrays:

[ [ [ 1, 2], [2, 3] ] , [ [ 3, 4], [ 4, 5] ] ] 

Clearly you couldn't parse that with true regular expressions.

I'd recommend converting your JSON to an object (JSON.parse) & implementing a find function to traverse the structure.

Other than that, you can take a look at guts of Douglas Crockford's json2.js parse method. Perhaps an altered version would allow you to search through the JSON string & just return the particular object you were looking for without converting the entire structure to an object. This is only useful if you never retrieve any other data from your JSON. If you do, you might as well have converted the whole thing to begin with.

EDIT

Just to further show how Regex breaks down, here's a regex that attempts to parse JSON

If you plug it into http://regexpal.com/ with "Dot Matches All" checked. You'll find that it can match some elements nicely like:

Regex

"Comments"[ :]+((?=\[)\[[^]]*\]|(?=\{)\{[^\}]*\}|\"[^"]*\") 

JSON Matched

"Comments": [
                { 
                    "User":"Fairy God Mother",
                    "Comment": "Ha, can't say I didn't see it coming"
                }
            ]

Regex

"Name"[ :]+((?=\[)\[[^]]*\]|(?=\{)\{[^\}]*\}|\"[^"]*\")

JSON Matched

"Name": "Humpty"

However as soon as you start querying for the higher structures like "Posts", which has nested arrays, you'll find that you cannot correctly return the structure since the regex does not have context of which "]" is the designated end of the structure.

Regex

"Posts"[ :]+((?=\[)\[[^]]*\]|(?=\{)\{[^\}]*\}|\"[^"]*\")

JSON Matched

"Posts": [
  {
      "Title": "How I fell",
      "Comments": [
          { 
              "User":"Fairy God Mother",
              "Comment": "Ha, can't say I didn't see it coming"
          }
      ]