JSON is stand for JavaScript Object Notation, it is a lightweight data-interchange format. You can see many Java applications started to throw away XML format and start using json as a new s data-interchange format. Java is all about object, often times, you need to convert an object into json format for data-interchange or vice verse.
In this article, we show you how to use Gson, JSON library, to convert object to/from json.
Gson is easy to learn and implement, what we need to know are following two methods
- toJson() – Convert Java object to JSON format
- fromJson() – Convert JSON into Java object
1. Gson Dependency
For non-Maven user, get the Gson library from Gson official site, for Maven user, declares following dependency in your pom.xml.
<dependency>
<groupId>com.google.code.gson</groupId>
<artifactId>gson</artifactId>
<version>1.7.1</version>
</dependency>
2. POJO
A pojo, with initialized values. Later use Gson to convert this object to/from JSON formatted string.
package com.mkyong.core;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.List;
public class DataObject {
private int data1 = 100;
private String data2 = "hello";
private List<String> list = new ArrayList<String>() {
{
add("String 1");
add("String 2");
add("String 3");
}
};
//getter and setter methods
@Override
public String toString() {
return "DataObject [data1=" + data1 + ", data2=" + data2 + ", list="
+ list + "]";
}
}
3. toJson() example
Convert object to JSON string, and save it as “file.json“.
package com.mkyong.core;
import java.io.FileWriter;
import java.io.IOException;
import com.google.gson.Gson;
public class GsonExample {
public static void main(String[] args) {
DataObject obj = new DataObject();
Gson gson = new Gson();
// convert java object to JSON format,
// and returned as JSON formatted string
String json = gson.toJson(obj);
try {
//write converted json data to a file named "file.json"
FileWriter writer = new FileWriter("c:\\file.json");
writer.write(json);
writer.close();
} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
System.out.println(json);
}
}
Output
{"data1":100,"data2":"hello","list":["String 1","String 2","String 3"]}
4. fromJson() example
Read data from “file.json“, convert back to object and display it.
package com.mkyong.core;
import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.FileReader;
import java.io.IOException;
import com.google.gson.Gson;
public class GsonExample {
public static void main(String[] args) {
Gson gson = new Gson();
try {
BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(
new FileReader("c:\\file.json"));
//convert the json string back to object
DataObject obj = gson.fromJson(br, DataObject.class);
System.out.println(obj);
} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}
Output
DataObject [data1=100, data2=hello, list=[String 1, String 2, String 3]]