HTTPArty/Rails: How to handle the Response array

Question

I am calling an API that returns an array of JSON objects and I cant seem to properly access each element. This is a sample return value of the API call

[{"param1":1,"param2":"blah1"},
{"param1":2,"param2":"blah2"},
{"param1":3,"param2":"blah3"}]

Here is me trying to call the API and print the first JSON response object's parameter

result = HTTParty.get('http://randomapi.com',query: options)
@a = result[0]['param1']
# puts "#{result}"
puts "#{@a}"

Doing this prints nothing. I know I am successfully accessing the URL because result will print the correct information.

I got information on how to access the JSON response through this URL http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/its-time-to-httparty

Edit: After reading comments below, I realized that the API call is returning a content type of text/html and parsing the text/html isnt working because the response is also returning the following header below the expected value. Is there any way to remove this without going into the string itself and stripping it out?

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html 
    xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
    <head>
        <title></title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <form method="post" action="GetRankingList.aspx?pvptype=1&amp;sid=1&amp;tm=20130821160000&amp;auth=77c9b582c3aed3d3974400cfb118fe4b" id="form1">
            <div class="aspNetHidden">
                <input type="hidden" name="__VIEWSTATE" id="__VIEWSTATE" value="/wEPDwULLTE2MTY2ODcyMjlkZLSAAAtd4/lj1u6b0GjPWM+p3i9tqI6sq+xDrRw2cAv3" />
            </div>
            <div></div>
        </form>
    </body>
</html>

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 23 '13 at 03:57

1

It seems that the API returns a response with a Content-Type different from application/json. You can check that by printing:

puts result.content_type

If so, the HTTParty parser may be interpreting the response as a plain text; And, thus, the code result[0]['param1'] evaluates to nil Maybe you can try to parse the desired value into @a with:

@a = JSON.parse(result)[0]['param1']

Don't forget to require the json library

require 'json'

Good luck!

answered Aug 23 '13 at 03:57

marcelrf

54
1

Thank you, you helped me realize that it isnt returning the proper JSON format. I tried your solution but it doesnt work in this case. I give more details in the edit I just made – user2158382 Aug 23 '13 at 04:40
I don't know the particulars of the API you're using. Maybe the API isn't correct, or maybe you could call it in a way that it only returns the expected _json_ (without extra _html_). If you finally decide to strip the header out, you can use: `result[0...result.index(' – marcelrf Aug 23 '13 at 05:21
I decided to just strip the header. Thank you!! – user2158382 Aug 23 '13 at 18:18

akbarbin · Answer 2 · 2013-08-23T04:26:00.440

0

when accessing json with format

require 'json'
result = JSON.parse('[{"param1":1,"param2":"blah1"},{"param1":2,"param2":"blah2"}, {"param1":3,"param2":"blah3"}]')
@a = result[0]["param1"]
puts @a

edited Aug 23 '13 at 04:26

answered Aug 23 '13 at 04:10

akbarbin

4,985
1
28
31

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 23 '13 at 04:11

0

You need to parse the parsed_response from the result.

@parsed = JSON.parse(result.parsed_response)

answered Aug 23 '13 at 04:11

nyzm

2,787
3
24
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HTTPArty/Rails: How to handle the Response array

3 Answers3