iOS 9 JSON Parsing loop - ios

Question

I'm creating an app that should retrieve some JSON from a database.
This is how my JSON looks:
[{"id":"1","longitude":"10","latitude":"10","visibility":"5","timestampAdded":"2015-10-01 15:01:39"},{"id":"2","longitude":"15","latitude":"15","visibility":"5","timestampAdded":"2015-10-01 15:06:25"}]
And this is the code i use:
if let jsonResult = JSON as? Array<Dictionary<String,String>> {
let longitudeValue = jsonResult[0]["longitude"]
let latitudeValue = jsonResult[0]["latitude"]
let visibilityValue = jsonResult[0]["visibility"]
print(longitudeValue!)
print(latitudeValue!)
print(visibilityValue!)
}
As you can see it only gets the first chunk from the JSON and if there are no JSON at all it will crash, but if i want it to count the amount and make an array out of it like this:
var longitudeArray = [10, 15]
var latitudeArray = [10, 15]
And so on...
I also need this to be apple watch compatible so i can't use SwiftyJSON.
What do i do? I really hope you can help me!
Thanks.
SOLVED!
Problems was solved by "Eric D."
This is the code:
do {
if let url = NSURL(string: "YOU URL HERE"),
let data = NSData(contentsOfURL: url),
let jsonResult = try NSJSONSerialization.JSONObjectWithData(data, options: []) as? [[String:AnyObject]] {
print(jsonResult)
let longitudeArray = jsonResult.flatMap { $0["longitude"] as? String }
let latitudeArray = jsonResult.flatMap { $0["latitude"] as? String }
print(longitudeArray)
print(latitudeArray)
}
} catch let error as NSError {
print(error.description)
}
Thank you soo much Eric!! :-)

Answer 1

You could use flatMap to get an array of your elements:
let longitudeArray = jsonResult.flatMap { $0["longitude"] as? String }
let latitudeArray = jsonResult.flatMap { $0["latitude"] as? String }
etc.
flatMap is like map but unwraps optionals, which is adequate because we need to safely cast the type of the object we get from each dictionary in the json array.
$0 represents the object in the current iteration of flatMap of the array it's applied to.
If you're currently using SwiftyJSON, then that would be:
let longitudeArray = jsonResult.flatMap { $1["longitude"].string }
let latitudeArray = jsonResult.flatMap { $1["latitude"].string }
because .string is SwiftyJSON's optional String value getter.
But as you said, you don't want to use it (anymore), so you need to use NSJSONSerialization to decode your JSON data, there's plenty of examples on the Web and on SO. Then you will be able to use my original answer.

Answer 2

You're already getting an array with all of the elements (not just the first one. you're simply only accessing the first one). jsonResult is an array of dictionaries. Each dictionary (in this case, based on the json you provided) contains these elements: id, longitude, latitude, visibility and timestampAdded. In order to access each of them, you can simply loop over jsonResult and access the i'th element (and not always the 0 element). This will also prevent the crash you're experiencing with the json is blank or invalid (since you'll only be going over the valid elements in jsonResult.
This will give you the flexibility to create the custom arrays you wish to create (in order to create an array of all of the longitudes, for example, you will simply add that element to the new array while looping over jsonResult). However, if you'd like to save yourself the trouble of manually building these arrays and assuming you have control over the json structure, I would recommend changing the received json to the relevant structure (a dictionary or arrays instead of an array of dictionaries), so it would better fit your needs and provide you the results in the relevant format right "out of the box".