JSON Parsing error in perl script

ksricwow has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi,

We have developed a perl script to monitor the Google Applications stats but my plugin sometimes give an 'malformed JSON string,' when running the script.

[root@clrfmd1 libexec]# ./check_googlestats.pl --service='Google Calen
+dar'
malformed JSON string, neither array, object, number, string or atom, 
+at character offset 0 (before "(end of string)") at ./check_googlesta
+ts.pl line 23
[download]

The plugin doesn't always throw this error and works pretty fine most of the time.

The URL that we are accessing is below

my $content = `curl http://www.google.com/appsstatus/json/en 2>/dev/nu
+ll`;
$content =~ s/dashboard.jsonp\(//g;
$content =~ s/\)\;$//g;
[download]

The script is trying to process the response from JSON by decoding the URL.

Does anybody have any idea on this? There appears to somehow the parsing is wrong and I am unable to find the problem. Could somebody please let me know what changes are required to get this going.

Regards,
Sricharan

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Re: JSON Parsing error in perl script by davido (Cardinal) on Aug 26, 2014 at 04:28 UTC
You should probably update your script such that when you get a "malformed JSON" error, the JSON that triggered the error would be dumped to a log file of some sort. By inspecting the malformed JSON, you will probably discover in what way it is mangled, and will have a better chance of figuring out how your code is mangling it. Dave	[reply]
Re: JSON Parsing error in perl script by NetWallah (Canon) on Aug 26, 2014 at 05:09 UTC
Instead of throwing away the contents of STDERR, you should probably capture it using something like Open3 , and examine the contents if you run into an error. "You're only given one little spark of madness. You mustn't lose it." - Robin Williams	[reply]
Re^2: JSON Parsing error in perl script by tobyink (Canon) on Aug 26, 2014 at 14:15 UTC
Or better yet, use a Perl module like HTTP::Tiny to fetch the JSON instead of spawning an external process. This would allow you to gracefully handle non-200-OK HTTP responses. toby döt ink	[reply]
Re: JSON Parsing error in perl script by Anonymous Monk on Aug 26, 2014 at 02:32 UTC
well, global substitutions don't make sense, other then that there is nothing `s/^\Qdashboard.jsonp(\E//; s/\Q);\E$//;` [download]	[reply] [d/l]