You should decode the JSON so you could interact with the data as Perl structures:

use JSON;

my $json = <<HERE;
{"id":241995,"name":"Georgia vs Finland","start":"2013-09-10T17:00:00.
+000Z","status":"paid","sport-id":15,"category-id":[146598],"markets":
+[],"meta-tags":[{"id":4,"name":"Soccer","type":"SPORT"},{"id":650,"na
+me":"Qualifiers","type":"COMPETITION"},{"id":5,"name":"World Cup 2014
+","type":"COMPETITION"},{"id":1,"name":"Sport","type":"Root"},{"id":6
+51,"name":"September 10th 2013","type":"DATE"}],"in-running-flag":fal
+se,"allow-live-betting":false}
HERE

my $data = decode_json($json);

my @meta_tag_ids = map {
    $_->{id}
} @{ $data->{meta_tags} };
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EDIT: Actually, maybe I understand the problem now...you only want the IDs of the metatags that display the sport being played and the date the sport was played on, correct?

use JSON;

my $json = <<HERE;
{"id":241995,"name":"Georgia vs Finland","start":"2013-09-10T17:00:00.
+000Z","status":"paid","sport-id":15,"category-id":[146598],"markets":
+[],"meta-tags":[{"id":4,"name":"Soccer","type":"SPORT"},{"id":650,"na
+me":"Qualifiers","type":"COMPETITION"},{"id":5,"name":"World Cup 2014
+","type":"COMPETITION"},{"id":1,"name":"Sport","type":"Root"},{"id":6
+51,"name":"September 10th 2013","type":"DATE"}],"in-running-flag":fal
+se,"allow-live-betting":false}
HERE

my $data = decode_json($json);
my @interesting_meta_tag_ids = ();

foreach my $metatag (@{ $data->{meta_tags} }) {
    my $type = $metatag->{type};

    if ($type eq 'SPORT' or $type eq 'DATE') {
        push @interesting_meta_tag_ids, $metatag->{id};
    }
}
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The OP's code snippet included this line:

my $var1 = $decoded->{'meta-tags'}[$i]{'id'};
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He's already using some JSON module to arrive at that data structure.




Dave

Hmm...you're right. I guess I don't understand the question then. The code I included seems to work for extracting the ID he wanted.

The date should be easy enough to get: grep the meta-tags array for the first item where type=>"DATE" and then take the "name" value from it. But on the other, I don't know how your program is supposed to know which type=>"COMPETITION" entry to use, so it could come up with either "Qualifiers" or "World Cup 2014" as the value. Unless there's a pattern to the data that you can count on -- the sport always comes last of any COMPETITION entries, for instance, or it's always the one with the smallest "id" value -- you're going to have a hard time picking it out programatically.

I came up with this to extract the ID tag its a horrible hack. Anyone know how I can extract the correct data everytime.?

Not sure, the format seems too dumb to correctly get the thing you want each time, both "Qualifiers" and "World Cup 2014" are of type "COMPETITION"

Your jsontidy.pl data

So what I would do is

my @meata = ...;
my %cat;
for my $meat ( @meata ){
    my( $type, $id, $name ) = @{$meat}{qw/ type id name/};
    $cat{ $type }{ $id } = $name;
}
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Then %category of $type of $id is valued $name

Then %category of $type of $id has value $name

G'day Gruaig,

Welcome to the monastery.

Your description of what you're trying to extract doesn't make sense. You say what you want "has the date and sports name in it". You then show two elements: the first has "name":"World Cup 2014" (which is possibly related to some sport and has a year); the second has "name":"September 10th 2013" (which clearly has a date but makes no reference to any sport).

The code you've posted is not really of much help. It's incomplete and, as such, can't be run to reproduce what you're running; nor do we know what else it is supposed to be doing (we can only guess at the code completing the if statement and for loop). Furthermore, including line numbers (as part of the code) is also unhelpful: we'd need to remove them to run the code.

This code shows how to access the meta-tags elements and conditionally extract them:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use JSON;
use Data::Dumper;

my $data = decode_json '{"id":241995,"name":"Georgia vs Finland","star
+t":"2013-09-10T17:00:00.000Z","status":"paid","sport-id":15,"category
+-id":[146598],"markets":[],"meta-tags":[{"id":4,"name":"Soccer","type
+":"SPORT"},{"id":650,"name":"Qualifiers","type":"COMPETITION"},{"id":
+5,"name":"World Cup 2014","type":"COMPETITION"},{"id":1,"name":"Sport
+","type":"Root"},{"id":651,"name":"September 10th 2013","type":"DATE"
+}],"in-running-flag":false,"allow-live-betting":false}';

my @extract;

meta_wanted($_) && push @extract, $_ for @{$data->{'meta-tags'}};

print Dumper \@extract;

sub meta_wanted {
    $_[0]->{type} eq 'SPORT' || $_[0]->{type} eq 'DATE'
}
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Output:

$VAR1 = [
          {
            'type' => 'SPORT',
            'id' => 4,
            'name' => 'Soccer'
          },
          {
            'name' => 'September 10th 2013',
            'id' => 651,
            'type' => 'DATE'
          }
        ];
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You'll need to define meta_wanted() how you want it: what I have there is just a guess and likely to be not what you're after.

If you need to ask a follow-up question, please read the guidelines in "How do I post a question effectively?" before doing so.

map {
    my $markets = $_->{markets};
    my $metatag = $_->{'meta-tags'};
    my @comp    = map {

        $_->{type} eq 'COMPETITION' ? $_->{name} : ();

    } @$metatag;
  print Dump \@comp;
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