Obj. C - how to deal with wrong written JSON - ios

Question

I obtained some badly written JSON file that's totally not readable through any AFNetworking and/or any other JSON serializing library. I must underline that I am not able to force to change it on server-side so I have to parse it as is.
Unfortunately it has some minor errors (I will paste small part of it):
locations = [{
"city": "Tokio",
(...)
"link": "http://somethig.com",
"text": "Mon-Fr.",
}, {
(... same repeated mistakes, but they're not regular)
}]
Aaand to parse it correctly in XCode i need to change it to correct format e.g.:
{
"locations": [{
"city": "Tokio",
(...)
"link": "http://somethig.com",
"text": "Mon-Fr."
}, {
(...)
}]
}
Do you have any idea how to deal with that?
If I will have to write my own parser - please advice me how to. Any help will be appreciated. I download this JSON from http link.

Answer 1

It looks like the API is sending you a string of JavaScript code. In JavaScript, you would use JSON.stringify() to convert the object to valid JSON. Here's an example from an interactive node.js shell:
> locations = [{
... "city": "Tokio",
... "link": "http://somethig.com",
... "text": "Mon-Fr.",
... }]
[ { city: 'Tokio', link: 'http://somethig.com', text: 'Mon-Fr.' } ]
> JSON.stringify(locations)
'[{"city":"Tokio","link":"http://somethig.com","text":"Mon-Fr."}]'
If you really can't change this on the server side, you might try creating a hidden UIWebView, adding the JavaScript, calling JSON.stringify(), and extracting the result. However, this will use many more resources than are needed. It would be much better (in terms of computing power, memory, and your time) to have the API call JSON.stringify() and send you a valid JSON string.
You could also try porting some of json3.js to Objective-C or Swift. I would start with the section beginning // Public: `JSON.stringify`. if you attempt this.