How to parse a Nested JSON - ios

Question

Thank you reading my post, I known this topic was asked so many time, and I had saw that but no luck...
I want to parse a simple JSON string, as followings:
[
{
"id":"1",
"name_en":"Photography",
"subchannels":[
{
"id":"4",
"name_en":"John"
},
{
"id":"18",
"name_en":"Sam"
}
]
},
{
"id":"7",
"name_en":"Equipment",
"subchannels":[
{
"id":"25",
"name_en":"ABC Company"
},
{
"id":"40",
"name_en":"CDE Company"
}
]
}
]
It had convert this string to NSDictionary
NSData *data = [str dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];
NSDictionary *testDic = [NSJSONSerialization JSONObjectWithData:data options:kNilOptions error:&e];
Then I list the Dictionary Key
for(id key in testDic) {
NSLog(#"%#", key);
}
The result is the entire record as the Dictionary Key, so I can't use [testDic objectForKey:key] to retrieve the value.
How can I get the first row name_en and the second row subchannels value?
(is it possible to retrieve easily like xpath in XML?)
Thank you for helping.

Answer 1

First of all. The root object of your model is NSArray object - not `NSDictionary. '[]' means array and {} means dictionary.
NSArray *dataArray = [NSJSONSerialization JSONObjectWithData:data options:kNilOptions error:&e];
for (NSDictionary *entry in dataArray) {
NSString *name = entry[#"name_en"];
NSArray *subchannels = entry[#"subchannels"]; //array of dictionaries
NSLog(#"Name %s", name);
for (NSDictionary *subchannel in subchannels) {
NSLog(#"Subchannels name %# id: %d", subchannel[#"name"], [subchannel[#"id"] integerValue]);
}
}
If you want to perform advances JSON parsing I encourage you to look at Mantle github project.