JSON and Regex Escape Characters

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1

I’m parsing a JSON response and am finding that some year strings are returned with the following format in JSON:

…,“Year”:“2009\u2013”,…

When I set year = Content.Year I’d like to replace the \u with a dash (ex. 2009-2013), but its showing up as “2009-” currently and I’m not able to even see the second year. I see that \u appears to be an escape character. Any idea how I can get this date range formatted correctly?

2

You could, before parsing, do a string replace on the data, and send the result to the JSON parser.

3

You just want to replace the string “\u” with “-”, right? It would help if you showed what code you’ve tried, but this will work. Note that since backslash is a regex metacharacter, you have to escape it.


regex = CreateObject("roRegex", "\\u", "")
year = regex.Replace(year, "-")

–Mark

4

Mark,

That’s the exact regex that I was trying as well, however, its not doing what we’re expecting here. Below is what I see in the debug console when I print Content.Year. Then I execute this regex and print that below. Doesn’t seem to be replacing anything and you can see the Ç char is printed for some reason.

2009                                  Ç
2009                                  Ç

Is the “\u2013” being displayed as this Ç character?

5

“destruk” wrote:
You could, before parsing, do a string replace on the data, and send the result to the JSON parser.

That’s a possible solution, but seems like I should be able to handle this data without processing it before JSON parsing. If all else fails I’ll give that a shot.

6

You can try rostring tokenize Solved a few similar problems for me

7

“kyleabaker” wrote:
I’m parsing a JSON response and am finding that some year strings are returned with the following format in JSON:
…,“Year”:“2009\u2013”,…
When I set year = Content.Year I’d like to replace the \u with a dash (ex. 2009-2013), but its showing up as “2009-” currently and I’m not able to even see the second year. I see that \u appears to be an escape character. Any idea how I can get this date range formatted correctly?
You guys, beating the wrong horse here.
There is no year “2013” in the string - rather \u2013 is a single character, EN DASH. Same as chr(&h2013) and chr(8211) if you want it in B/S. Due to looking as a year number, confusion is understandable. Apropos, \u2014 is EM DASH (dash with the width of letter “M”).

It should be displayed as “2009-”; i suppose it means “2009 and later”.

“kyleabaker” wrote:
Doesn’t seem to be replacing anything and you can see the Ç char is printed for some reason.Yes, it is not replacing anything, because there is no r"\u" in the string. The display of EN DASH as tabs+Ç is some idiosyncrasy of the console, which i rather not dig into (could be the telnet protocol, terminal emulator etc).