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End of Life Ruby 3.2 has reached end of life and gets no more fixes. Switch to Ruby 4.0 →

instance method

JSON#parse

JSON.parse(source, opts) → object

Returns the Ruby objects created by parsing the given source.

Argument source contains the String to be parsed.

Argument opts, if given, contains a Hash of options for the parsing. See Parsing Options.


When source is a JSON array, returns a Ruby Array:

Example
source = '["foo", 1.0, true, false, null]'
ruby = JSON.parse(source)
ruby # => ["foo", 1.0, true, false, nil]
ruby.class # => Array

When source is a JSON object, returns a Ruby Hash:

Example
source = '{"a": "foo", "b": 1.0, "c": true, "d": false, "e": null}'
ruby = JSON.parse(source)
ruby # => {"a"=>"foo", "b"=>1.0, "c"=>true, "d"=>false, "e"=>nil}
ruby.class # => Hash

For examples of parsing for all JSON data types, see Parsing JSON.

Parses nested JSON objects:

Example
source = <<-EOT
{
"name": "Dave",
  "age" :40,
  "hats": [
    "Cattleman's",
    "Panama",
    "Tophat"
  ]
}
EOT
ruby = JSON.parse(source)
ruby # => {"name"=>"Dave", "age"=>40, "hats"=>["Cattleman's", "Panama", "Tophat"]}

Raises an exception if source is not valid JSON:

Example
# Raises JSON::ParserError (783: unexpected token at ''):
JSON.parse('')
See also #parse! #load_file! #load_file #pretty_generate also in 4.1 · 4.0 · 3.4 · 3.3 · 3.1 · 3.0