Hello Monks! If could anyone during perl-meditation put a light on the problem, then I would be grateful...

Background: there are some multi-level structured data in JSON for our internal web page. I told marketing people that the data is in JSON and they could edit that data in Notepad++. They are not happy with that. They want Excel. So I decided that I will convert JSON to Excel, they will edit Excel table, and I will read that table back to JSON data. Me and marketing people agreed to have complicated column names... -- these column names would be just JSON Paths.

So I need to read JSON data, and emit pairs -- JSON path and value under this path. Here is the program to write such data.

What is my question? Where do I need help? Is there a simpler way of doing such conversion JSON --> path/values? How to tell Perl to dive into JSON and find all simple data (scalars...) and return paths and values of them... 

 



#!/usr/bin/perl -CSDA

use utf8; 
use Modern::Perl qw{2019}; 
use JSON; 
use Data::Dumper; 

sub extract_paths_values { 
    my ($cur_node, $top_path, $put_here) = @_; 

    $top_path //= "\$"; 
    $put_here //= {}; 

    if (ref $cur_node eq "HASH") { 
        extract_paths_values($$cur_node{$_}, "$top_path\['$_'\]", $put
+_here)
            for keys %$cur_node; 
    } elsif (ref $cur_node eq "ARRAY") { 
        extract_paths_values($$cur_node[$_], "$top_path\[$_\]", $put_h
+ere) 
            for 0 .. @$cur_node - 1; 
    } else { 
        $$put_here{$top_path} = $cur_node; 
    } 

    return $put_here; 
} 

my $json = '
{
    "store" : {
        "files": [ 
            ["alfa.txt", "about first letter in greek"], 
            ["model.dxf", "for architects"], 
            ["errors.txt", "no need for that normally"], 
        ], 
        "book" : [
            {
                "category" : "reference",
                "title" : "Sayings of the Century",
                "author" : "Nigel Rees",
                "price" : 8.95
            },
            {
                "author" : "Evelyn Waugh",
                "title" : "Sword of Honour",
                "price" : 12.99,
                "category" : "fiction"
            },
        ],
        "bicycle" : [
            {
                "price" : 19.95,
                "color" : "red"
            }
        ]
    }, 
    "status" : { 
        "curr" : "Okey", 
        "code" :  232, 
    }
}
'; 

my $paths_values = extract_paths_values(
    JSON->new->relaxed->decode($json) 
); 

print "$_ ~~~~> $$paths_values{$_}\n"
    for sort keys %$paths_values; 

print "Hurray! Done that  \n";

[download]

result:

$['status']['code'] ~~~~> 232
$['status']['curr'] ~~~~> Okey
$['store']['bicycle'][0]['color'] ~~~~> red
$['store']['bicycle'][0]['price'] ~~~~> 19.95
$['store']['book'][0]['author'] ~~~~> Nigel Rees
$['store']['book'][0]['category'] ~~~~> reference
$['store']['book'][0]['price'] ~~~~> 8.95
$['store']['book'][0]['title'] ~~~~> Sayings of the Century
$['store']['book'][1]['author'] ~~~~> Evelyn Waugh
$['store']['book'][1]['category'] ~~~~> fiction
$['store']['book'][1]['price'] ~~~~> 12.99
$['store']['book'][1]['title'] ~~~~> Sword of Honour
$['store']['files'][0][0] ~~~~> alfa.txt
$['store']['files'][0][1] ~~~~> about first letter in greek
$['store']['files'][1][0] ~~~~> model.dxf
$['store']['files'][1][1] ~~~~> for architects
$['store']['files'][2][0] ~~~~> errors.txt
$['store']['files'][2][1] ~~~~> no need for that normally
Hurray! Done that :)

[download]

In reply to convert JSON to JSON Paths -- try not to reinvent the wheel (?) by leszekdubiel

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