[sireat]

When Scala, IntelliJ and SBT cooperate the language is so pleasant to work with.

There are some puzzling omissions though.

For example slice method is missing step. Coming from heavy data munging Python this really bites. Sure would be nice to have some syntactic sugar for slice.

Some seemingly simple tasks have no one way of solving them.

Let's take parsing JSON. Trivial in Python, painful in Scala. (almost the reverse in Python which has painful XML parsing and Scala's built in support for XML)

So far the easiest JSON library has been Li Haoyi's uPickle: https://www.lihaoyi.com/post/HowtoworkwithJSONinScala.html

Still, it does not parse JSON where objects have uknown arbitrary value types. Arbitrary value types are extremely common in real life JSON.

Due to pattern matching you see people suggesting you write your own parser! Sure it can be done, but then the next thing you'll be rolling your own crypto...

[sjrd]

> So far the easiest JSON library has been Li Haoyi's uPickle: https://www.lihaoyi.com/post/HowtoworkwithJSONinScala.html

> Still, it does not parse JSON where objects have uknown arbitrary value types. Arbitrary value types are extremely common in real life JSON.

Looks like ujson, which the article you point to talks about, is what you're looking for. uPickle is a layer on top of ujson for statically typed stuff, but ujson is working with raw JSON values, of arbitrary types.

[sireat]

Thank you! I will have to look into ujson deeper.

[lihaoyi]

You can in fact mix typed and untyped parsing, by having a `ujson.Value` field in the middle of your typed case class or collection. It just works

[sireat]

Thank you Li!

`ujson.Value` is in chapter 8.1.1. of your excellent Hands-On Scala book I've bought.

Turns out for arbitrary JSON you can do this:

  val rawData = read[ujson.Value](JSONstring)

For JSON where you know most of the structure but have mixed types for object values: https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/todos

  val todoData = read[Seq[Map[String,ujson.Value]]](todoJSON)

[vips7L]

Why wouldn't you just use Jackson for JSON? It makes parsing JSON trivial on the JVM.