TouchJSON is an Objective-C based parser and generator for JSON encoded data. TouchJSON compiles for Mac OS X and iOS devices (currently iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch).
It is based on Jonathan Wight's CocoaJSON code: http://toxicsoftware.com/cocoajson/
TouchJSON is part of the TouchCode "family" of open source software.
This code is licensed under the 2-clause BSD license ("Simplified BSD License" or "FreeBSD License") license. The license is reproduced below:
Copyright 2011 Jonathan Wight. All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
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Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
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Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY JONATHAN WIGHT ''AS IS'' AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL JONATHAN WIGHT OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
The views and conclusions contained in the software and documentation are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing official policies, either expressed or implied, of Jonathan Wight.
The "master" branch of TouchJSON does NOT use Automatic Reference Counting (ARC).
There is a branch that does use ARC - this is found at "features/ARC".
Most new development occurs on the ARC branch. At some point the non-ARC branch will put into maintenance mode and the ARC branch will become the primary branch.
The main home page for touchcode is http://touchcode.com/
The main source repository for touchcode is on github at http://github.com/TouchCode/TouchJSON
The primary author is Jonathan Wight http://toxicsoftware.com/ with several other people contributing bug fixes, patches and documentation. (Note: if you have contributed to TouchJSON and want to be listed here let Jonathan Wight know).
- http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4627.txt?number=4627
- http://www.json.org/
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSON
There's a relatively low traffic mailing list hosted on Google Groups: http://groups.google.com/group/touchcode-dev
File bugs on the github issue tracker http://github.com/TouchCode/TouchJSON/issues but please make sure that your JSON data is valid (see http://www.jsonlint.com/ before filing bugs (of course if you've found a crash with TouchJSON's handling of invalid JSON feel free to file a bug or discuss on the mailing list).
There are many things you can do to help TouchJSON
- Find bugs and file issues
- Fix bugs
- File feature requests (We would love to see more TouchJSON feature requests)
- Write more unit tests
- Help improve the documentation
- Help profile and optimise TouchJSON for speed and memory usage
TouchJSON is incredibly easy to use. Usually you can convert JSON data to and from a Cocoa representation in just a line of code.
None! TouchJSON compiles on Mac OS X (note it does use ObjC-2) and iOS. It should compile on all versions of iOS to date.
Note that the demo, unit tests and bench-marking projects run on Mac OS X.
Copy the source files within TouchJSON/Source to your project. The easiest way is to open both projects in Xcode, then drag and drop. Make sure to check "Copy items into destination groups folder (if needed)."
Be aware that the code in the Experimental subdirectory of Source is just that and may not have been extensively tested and/or have extra dependencies
Put #import "CJSONDeserializer.h" in your source file.
NSData *theJSONData = /* some JSON data */
NSError *theError = nil;
id theObject = [[CJSONDeserializer deserializer] deserialize:theJSONData error:&theError];}
This will convert an NSData object containing JSON into an object. The resulting object's class depends on the type of JSON data in question. If the object is NULL then deserialization has failed and you should check the error parameter.
The following, slightly more complex example shows how to convert an NSString containing a JSON dictionary into an NSDictionary:
NSString *jsonString = @"yourJSONHere";
NSData *jsonData = [jsonString dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
NSError *error = nil;
NSDictionary *dictionary = [[CJSONDeserializer deserializer] deserializeAsDictionary:jsonData error:&error];
This deserialization will fail if the JSON root object is not a dictionary. Again check the error.
Put #include "NSDictionary_JSONExtensions.h" in your source file.
NSString *theJSONString = @"{\"key\":\"value\"}";
NSError *theError = NULL;
NSDictionary *theDictionary = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithJSONString:theJSONString error:&theError];
This version of the code could be considered more convenient than the above former examples.
If your input JSON data contains null values these values will, by default, be represented by NSNull in your output ObjC objects. The following example shows you how to avoid NSNull values in your output:
NSData *theJSONData = /* some JSON data */
CJSONDeserializer *theDeserializer = [CJSONDeserializer deserializer];
theDeserializer.nullObject = NULL;
NSError *theError = nil;
id theObject = [theDeserializer deserialize:theJSONData error:&theError];}
Put #import "CJSONDataSerializer.h" in your file.
Here is a code sample:
NSDictionary *dictionary = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObject:@"b" forKey:@"a"];
NSError *error = NULL;
NSData *jsonData = [[CJSONSerializer serializer] serializeObject:dictionary error:&error];
If you think your JSON is valid but TouchJSON is failing to process it correctly (or if you think TouchJSON is producing invalid JSON) use the online JSON lint tool to validate your JSON: http://www.jsonlint.com/
It is especially important to validate your JSON before filing bugs.
TouchJSON will work with JSON with any string encoding supported by the Foundation framework. However internally TouchJSON prefers UTF8, so for performance purposes you should try to use UTF8 if at all possible.
JSON doesn't specify a date encoding format. As such various methods are used. As such TouchJSON doesn't dictate which format you use. ISO 8601 style dates (with as much precession as needed) are recoemmended. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601. You can use the CFilteringJSONSerializer class to automatically serialize Cocoa's NSDate objects into ISO-8601 strings