Circe

Json is the circe data type representing a JSON object. It's very useful to be familiar with this data type since it's how circe models the base type we want to address.

To begin, let's briefly talk about the shape of every Json object. It's basically semi-structured data built on top of key-value pairs. These key-value pairs have a specific shape:

keys are strings.
values can be multiple types.

Next, to model a real JSON object, we need to support different data types in the value field. For this purpose, we have different available methods so we can create a Json object from different source data types. Some examples of these methods are fromString, fromBoolean, fromDouble and so on. For further details about all possible methods, see the Scala docs.

Let's take a look at how these methods work.

scala> import io.circe.Json
scala> // fromString example
scala> val jsonString: Json = Json.fromString("scala exercises")
jsonString: io.circe.Json = "scala exercises"

scala> // fromDouble example
scala> val jsonDouble: Option[Json] = Json.fromDouble(1)
jsonDouble: Option[io.circe.Json] = Some(1.0)

scala> val jsonBoolean: Json = Json.fromBoolean(true)
jsonBoolean: io.circe.Json = true

scala> // fromFields example
scala> val fieldList = List(
        ("key1", Json.fromString("value1")),
        ("key2", Json.fromInt(1)))
fieldList: List[(String, io.circe.Json)] = List((key1,"value1"), (key2,1))

scala> val jsonFromFields: Json = Json.fromFields(fieldList)
jsonFromFields: io.circe.Json =
{
  "key1" : "value1",
  "key2" : 1
}

In addition, there are a few other methods that allow you to convert a Json object to a String.

scala> jsonFromFields.noSpaces
res0: String = {"name":"sample json","version":1,"data":{"done":false,"rate":4.9}}

scala> jsonFromFields.spaces2
res1: String =
{
  "name" : "sample json",
  "version" : 1,
  "data" : {
    "done" : false,
    "rate" : 4.9
  }
}

scala> jsonFromFields.spaces4
res2: String =
{
    "name" : "sample json",
    "version" : 1,
    "data" : {
        "done" : false,
        "rate" : 4.9
    }
}

What would be the string output for our jsonFromFields value?

jsonFromFields.noSpaces should be(res0)

Let's see how we can use these methods to create custom Jsons that represents specific JSON strings.

"{\"key\":\"value\"}" should be(res0.noSpaces)

"{\"name\":\"sample json\",\"data\":{\"done\":false}}" should be(
  Json.fromFields(List(res1, res2)).noSpaces)

"[{\"x\":1}]" should be(res3.noSpaces)

Furthemore, there are some other methods that allow you to deal with Json objects and apply transformation. We can use them to modify or apply any changes to a given Json object in a simpler way, as if we we're dealing with it manually.

We are going to start with this Json array:

val jsonArray: Json = Json.fromValues(List(
  Json.fromFields(List(("field1", Json.fromInt(1)))),
  Json.fromFields(List(
    ("field1", Json.fromInt(200)),
    ("field2", Json.fromString("Having circe in Scala Exercises is awesome"))))))

Finally, we have a transformJson method:

def transformJson(jsonArray: Json): Json =
  jsonArray mapArray { oneJson: Vector[Json] =>
    oneJson.init
  }

So, with these in mind, what should be the result if we apply our transformJson function to our jsonArray value?

transformJson(jsonArray).noSpaces should be(res0)

Sections

Json