G'day zesys,

Welcome to the Monastery.

"... I often find it a daunting task making sense of a JSON response."

You don't say what aspects of this you find daunting. Here's a few tips.

JSON is often presented as a single string many hundreds or thousands of characters long. I typically find this impossible to read at a glance; no doubt, you do too. The solution is to format that string into a more humanly readable structure. I use "JSON Formatter and Validator" for this; if you don't like that one, there are many others available, so just search for something that better suits you.

Now that you have a readable structure, just think of each ':' as a '=>' and you have a Perl hashref. That's a slight oversimplification but, in nearly all cases, it will hold true.

# JSON:
{
    "string" : "value",
    "array" : [ 1, 2, 3 ],
    "hash" : {
        "key1" : "val1",
        "key2" : "val2"
    }
}

# Perl:
{
    "string" => "value",
    "array" => [ 1, 2, 3 ],
    "hash" => {
        "key1" => "val1",
        "key2" => "val2"
    }
}
[download]

The JSON syntax is actually very simple. It's described, clearly and succinctly, in "Introducing JSON".

If you're not completely familiar with hashrefs, take a look at the Hashes section of "perlintro: Perl variable types". That section — indeed, the entirety of the perlintro page — is peppered with with links to more detailed descriptions, additional information, and more advanced, related topics: don't be put off by the idea that this page is just an introduction for complete novices.

There's also a few gotchas which may not be immediately obvious; in some cases, they're highly unintuitive. Here's a couple that have tripped me up in the past:

• Valid JavaScript is not necessarily valid JSON. Strings in JSON must be delimited by double-quotes, so { "answer": 42 } is valid in both. These, however, are valid in JavaScript but not in JSON: { 'answer': 42 } and { answer: 42 }.
• In Perl, the final element in a list may be optionally followed by a comma; in JSON, that final comma is not allowed. So, [ 1, 2, 3 ] is valid in both; however, [ 1, 2, 3, ] is valid Perl but invalid JSON.

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