Friday, May 18, 2012

Safely turning a JSON string into an object


Given a string of JSON data, how can you safely turn that string into a JavaScript object?



Obviously you can do this unsafely with something like...




var obj = eval("(" + json + ')');



...but that leaves us vulnerable to the json string containing other code, which it seems very dangerous to simply eval.


Source: Tips4all

8 comments:

  1. JSON.org has JSON parsers for many languages including 4 different ones for Javascript. I believe most people would consider json2.js their goto implementation.

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  2. Don't bother with that crap. If you're using jQuery just use:

    jQuery.parseJSON( jsonString );

    It's exactly what you're looking for

    http://api.jquery.com/jQuery.parseJSON/

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  3. Why not just:

    JSON.parse(jsonString);

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  4. I'm not sure about other ways to do it but here's how you do it in Prototype (JSON tutorial).

    new Ajax.Request('/some_url', {
    method:'get',
    requestHeaders: {Accept: 'application/json'},
    onSuccess: function(transport){
    var json = transport.responseText.evalJSON(true);
    }
    });


    Calling evalJSON() with true as the argument sanitizes the incoming string.

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  5. If you're using jQuery, you can also just do $.getJSON(url, function(data) { });

    Then you can do things like data.key1.something, data.key1.something_else, etc.

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  6. $.ajax({
    url: url,
    dataType: 'json',
    data: data,
    success: callback
    });



    The callback is passed the returned data, which will be a JavaScript object or array as defined by the JSON structure and parsed using the $.parseJSON() method.

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  7. JS Guru Douglas Crockford has written a parseJSON function which you download here

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  8. I have successfully been using json_sans_eval for a while now. According to its author, it is more secure than json2.js.

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