I am new to Swift. I am trying to make a simple REST call and access the data that is returned. I am testing with the Zippopotam API, which returns city information based on zipcode. I get the result from the REST call and put it into a dictionary:
var jsonResult: NSDictionary = NSJSONSerialization.JSONObjectWithData(data,
options:NSJSONReadingOptions.MutableContainers, error: nil) as! NSDictionary
Here is some of the data that prints out when I print the json:
{
country = "United States";
"country abbreviation" = US;
places = (
{
latitude = "40.5541";
longitude = "-111.9539";
"place name" = "South Jordan";
state = Utah;
"state abbreviation" = UT;
}
);
"post code" = 84095;
}
First of all, is there a better way to access a key value pair than
json["post code"].text!
That seems so low level to get the information, but maybe that is the only way to do it in Swift.
Next, my places are a tuple. When I access the places, I get the information in parentheses ( info ...). How do I access the state in the first tuple? I have tried json["places"].0["state"], but that is not correct.
JSON only has three basic types - arrays, dictionaries and strings. These are mapped by NSJSONSerialization to NSDictionary (which is bridged to a Swift dictionary), NSArray (bridged to Swift array) and NSString (bridged to String).
The simplest way to access the data returned by NSJSONSerialization is to just read the dictionaries & arrays as you have.
In the case of 'places' it is an array of dictionaries so to get 'state' you can say
if let places=json["places"] as? [[String:AnyObject]] {
if (places.count > 0) {
let place=places[0]
let state=place["state"] as! String
}
}
The "better" way is to take the JSON and use it create objects with appropriate properties. Unfortunately unlike XML which can use a defined schema to automatically generate this 'parsing' code you have to do this yourself
Related
I have passed a dictionary to a second view controller and assigned it to an array, I thought I could access the data easier this way:
var myAlerts: NSDictionary!
The dictionary has three elements for each: Id (which I don't care about), alertDate, and alertNote.
I'm trying to get these elements into a tableView but struggling with this.
I thought about just moving it into two arrays and accessing it that way, cumbersome but it at least gets me further down the road so to speak.
Here is the raw data from the dictionary AFTER it was past to the second controller:
{
alerts = (
{
alertDate = "2017-07-16";
alertNote = "Rob is the worlds greatest friend";
id = 2;
},
{
alertDate = "2017-07-17";
alertNote = "This is a test of the emergency system";
id = 1;
}
);
}
When I tried to move the values into two arrays with this:
func CreateArray() {
for i in 0...myAlerts.count {
alertsDate[i] = myAlerts["alerts"]["alertDate"]
alertsNote[i] = myAlerts["alerts"]["alertNote"]
}
}
I get the proverbial Type Any? has no subscript members.
Any help would be appreciated.
myAlerts with that data is now a dictionary containing an array of dictionaries. (so top level is a dictionary, with one key/value pair which is of type array of [String:Any] objects).
Since a dictionary value is of type Any, it can't infer in this case what the type of the value for the key alerts is. So you have to try cast it to a specific type first, in this case an array of dictionaries, i.e. [[String:Any]]
So this should get rid of your error:
func CreateArray() {
for i in 0...myAlerts.count {
let alertArray = myAlerts["alerts"] as! [[String:Any]]
alertsDate.append(alertArray[i]["alertDate"] as! String)
alertsNote.append(alertArray[i]["alertNote"] as! String)
}
}
Note: I had to change alertsDate and alertsNote arrays to using append as in my demo code i had no existing items in the array and using and index would have caused an error.
I have an NSDictionary that has a key like messageID5 and the value has three key/value pairs.
I know the NSDictionary only has 1 value in it because I limited my query to 1. But I don't know the name of the key. I just want the value, but I can't access it like an array [0]. You can access it just fine in PHP or Python. I've been trying a lot of different solutions for this basic problem, but a lot of them seem overly messy. anyValue[0] gives me a type error.
If you don't know your dictionary keys, you can get your NSDictionary allKeys.first property or allValues.first:
let dict = NSDictionary(dictionary: ["a":["b":1]])
let subDict = dict[dict.allKeys.first] as? [String:Any] ?? [:] // ["b": 1]
// or
let subDict = dict.allValues.first as? [String:Any] ?? [:] // ["b": 1]
The first thing to acknowledge is that key/value pairs in dictionaries does not maintain any specific order - this is required for an optimization in access to the contents of this structure.
As for your case if you're 100% sure you'll have only one value inside your dictionary you can use .allValues.first to retrieve the contained value. If your know that the type of your value is NSDictionary the whole code may look like this:
let childDictionary = rootDictionary.allValues.first as? NSDictionary
I suggest using (dictionary as Dictionary).values.first. That returns an optional, since it can fail if the dictionary is empty.
(Note that I edited this answer to cast the dictionary from an NSDictionary to a Dictionary so you an use the values property. NSDictionary doesn't have a values property, but Dictionary does.)
I can make a Facebook SDK Graph Request to get a user's likes, but I'm having trouble taking the returned values and storing one of the keys in an array of Strings. The request returns an NSDictionary of keys/values. Then, using objectForKey I can get the data key which returns what I want: the id and name of the "liked" page on Facebook.
Data returns elements like this:
{
id = 486379781543416;
name = "Star Wars Movies";
},
I specifically want only the "name" of all of these objects and to throw them into an array [String]. I tried to loop through the objects but I'm getting error ambiguous use of subscript. Here's the relevant code:
request.startWithCompletionHandler{(connection:FBSDKGraphRequestConnection!, result:AnyObject!, error:NSError!) -> Void in
let resultdict = result as! NSDictionary
let likes = resultdict.objectForKey("data") as! NSArray
print("Found \(likes.count) likes")
print(likes)
for object in likes{
let name = object["name"] as! String //error: ambiguous use of subsript
print(name)
}
}
After doing some research it looks like the issue is with the NSArray and that I should instead use Swift data types. I tried casting it to a Swift array but I got different errors.
What's the best way to handle this error?
Thanks!
update: Here is what the facebook API request returns:
{
data = (
{
id = 111276025563005;
name = "Star Wars (film)";
},
{
id = 115061321839188;
name = "Return of the Jedi";
}
);
paging = {
cursors = {
after = MTE1MDYxMzIxODM5MTg4;
before = Mjc0NzYzODk2MTg4NjY5;
};
next = "https://graph.facebook.com/v2.5/10155262562690368/likes?access_token=<redacted>";
};
}
You should always use the native Swift collection types wherever possible as NSArray and NSDictionary are really type-inspecific, and therefore can easily trigger "ambiguous use of subscript" errors.
You'll also want to avoid force down-casting, in case you receive data that's in the wrong format, or no data at all. This situation would be more elegantly handled with a guard, in order to prevent a crash. If your program depends on the force down-casting succeeding, and therefore should crash – then you can always call fatalError in the guard, with a descriptive error message in order to assist you in debugging the problem.
If I understand your data structure correctly, the request returns an AnyObject that should be a [String:AnyObject] (A dictionary of strings to any objects). In the case of the "data" key, the AnyObject value is then a [[String:AnyObject]] (An array of dictionaries of strings to any objects).
Therefore you'll want to do your casting in two stages. First, using a conditional downcast on your result to cast it as a [String:AnyObject]. If this fails, then the else clause of the guard will be executed and the code will return. You'll then want to get out your "data" value (your 'likes' array), and conditionally downcast it to a [[String:AnyObject]]. Both of these statements will handle the possibility of resultDict or resultDict["data"] being nil.
guard let resultDict = result as? [String:AnyObject] else {return}
guard let likes = resultDict["data"] as? [[String:AnyObject]] else {return}
You can put whatever error handling logic you want in the brackets of these statements to handle cases in which the results dictionary doesn't exist, was the wrong format, or there wasn't a 'likes' array in it.
You can then get an array of 'like' names through using flatMap.
let likeNames = likes.flatMap{$0["name"] as? String}
This will create an array of the like names of each dictionary – if the like names don't exist or aren't strings, then they won't be added. Because the compiler knows for certain that likes is a [[String:AnyObject]] – there's no ambiguity in subscripting its elements.
If you want a more general approach such as you're doing in your question, you can use a guard statement within a for loop.
for object in likes {
guard let name = object["name"] as? String else {continue}
print(name)
}
Again, you can put whatever error handling you wish in the brackets of the guard.
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!! :-)
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.
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".
I am using the VK SDK for iOS, and I need to take out the images URLs from JSON response from VK.
The response is look like this:
The actual response could be AnyObject OR String, and I only need the largest image URL (photo_1280) as string.
In the response comes 1-10 photos and which parameters I will need to change to get the particular photo like first or second and so on.
I'm using Swift in my project but can understand Objective-C.
JSON is just a format that lets you exchange information between languages (or objects).
You need to 'parse' the string into a JSON object. Its a little different for each language. For example on iOS I create my UI elements from a JSON file where I load the file and create a dictionary object from it. In your case you are doing it from a string. You need to turn that string into a valid object in your language. In Swift I prefer a Dictionary. So I use a typealias for that and cast the nsDictionary as that type of object.
Then to access objects, I access keys in the dictionary. In your case you would create a dictionary object too, and access the "attachments" object, which in your case is an array so you'll need to do extra processing on it to get each image (i.e. go through the array). This should get you going.
typealias Dict = Dictionary<String,AnyObject>
func loadDictionaryFromJSON(jsonString:String) -> Dict
{
var JSONData:NSData! = jsonString.dataUsingEncoding(NSUTF8StringEncoding)
var JSONError:NSError?
let swiftObject:AnyObject = NSJSONSerialization.JSONObjectWithData(JSONData, options: NSJSONReadingOptions.AllowFragments, error: &JSONError)!
if let nsDictionaryObject = swiftObject as? NSDictionary
{
if let dictionaryObject = nsDictionaryObject as Dictionary?
{
return dictionaryObject as Dict
}else
{
println("Error could not make dictionary from NSDictionary in \(self)")
}
}else
{
"Error could not make NSDictionary in \(self)"
}
println("Empty dictionary passed, fix it!")
return Dict()
}
Now to access things you just do
var objects:Dictionary<String,AnyObject> = loadDictionaryFromJSON("{"what":"ever"}")
var whatever = objects["what"]