Gson parse unquoted value

Question

I using in my project GSON library, everything is fine, but now i'm stuck with a problem, where i need to use a custom deserializer on unquoted values.

I have the following value, and need to parse from json:

[ ["county","=", field_name], ["name", "ilike", "username"] ]

I need to parse unquoted values with a custom deserializer, to a wrapper class like:

public class StringField {
    private String value;

    public String getValue() {
        return value;
    }

}

And value will have "field_name" as string.

Answer 1

The problem is that the data is not valid JSON.

JSON does not permit such "unquoted value" strings such as field_name and neither does Gson. Either fix the input such that it is valid JSON (perhaps "$field_name$") - or use a tool (i.e. not Gson) that can cope with non-JSON text that resembles JSON.

This situation can't be corrected with Custom Deserialization because the data isn't even parsed correctly to Json tokens: Gson will throw an exception as the invalid/non-JSON is encountered.

At the very least this would require creating a customized JsonReader implementation that can read "barewords" as strings. However, this is problematic to do because JsonReader does not conform to any specialized interfaces (so it must be subclassed, oops!) and is final (so it can't be subclassed, oops!). As such, unless willing to edit the Gson library source: not possible.