String to JSONArray giving exception because of slash in string

Question

I am trying to convert a json string to JSONArray of org.json.JSONArray class, the string contains a dateformat with forward slah, but I am getting the following exception because of the slash included in string.

public static void main(String args[]) throws JSONException{

        String jsonString = "[{ID:1, Name:Ann, DOB:14/08/1991}, {ID:2, Name:Vann, DOB:14/08/1992}]";
        JSONArray jsonArray = new JSONArray(jsonString);
        System.out.println(jsonArray.toString());
    }

Exception in thread "main" org.json.JSONException: Expected a ',' or '}' at 25 [character 26 line 1]
    at org.json.JSONTokener.syntaxError(JSONTokener.java:451)
    at org.json.JSONObject.<init>(JSONObject.java:230)
    at org.json.JSONTokener.nextValue(JSONTokener.java:380)
    at org.json.JSONArray.<init>(JSONArray.java:118)
    at org.json.JSONArray.<init>(JSONArray.java:147)
    at com.s4m.sftp.service.impl.SFTPServiceImpl.main(SFTPServiceImpl.java:1150)

Answer 1

String values in JSON

Strings should be quoted... including the attribute names. See the JSON specification:

An object structure is represented as a pair of curly brackets surrounding zero or more name/value pairs (or members). A name is a string.

The representation of strings is similar to conventions used in the C family of programming languages. A string begins and ends with quotation marks.

Date values in JSON

JSON has no representation for date type. It must be represented as a string. See this answer for more information.

Online JSON validator

You can use online JSON validators to check the validity.

Valid JSON

[
   {
      "ID":1,
      "Name":"Ann",
      "DOB":"14/08/1991"
   },
   {
      "ID":2,
      "Name":"Vann",
      "DOB":"14/08/1992"
   }
]

However, I would use the format yyyy-mm-dd for date values instead of dd/mm/yyyy.

Valid JSON as Java String

String jsonString =
"[{\"ID\":1,\"Name\":\"Ann\",\"DOB\":\"14/08/1991\"},{\"ID\":2,\"Name\":\"Vann\",\"DOB\":\"14/08/1992\"}]";