Stringify & Parse

The JavaScript JSON object contains two useful methods for parsing JSON and converting it to JSON string.

JSON.stringify()

The JSON.stringify() method usually converts a JavaScript array or an object into a JSON string. Consider an array called droids, say, of the well-known droid characters in Star Wars. 

					
					var droids = ["R2-D2", "C-3PO", "BB-8"];

The above array can be converted into a JSON string using the command below 

					
					var d  = JSON.stringify(droids);

Since the variable d above is assigned to the stringified string, the commands d[0] and d.length below 

					> d[0];
					> d.length;

returns the first character ([) and the total length of the JSON string (24) respectively.

js json stringify

JSON.parse()

JSON.parse() does just the opposite of JSON.stringify() - it parses a well-formed JSON string and returns a JavaScript object. The stringified JSON text in the variable d above can be converted into a JavaScript object as 

					
					JSON.parse(d);
js json parse

Similarly, we can convert JavaScript objects into JSON strings using the JSON.stringify() method. Note that in the above section we have applied JSON.stringify() on an array. Consider the object below 

					
					var droid = {
						name:"BB-8", 
						year:2015, 
						episode:"VII"
					};

As with arrays above, the same can be applied to it

					
					var d  = JSON.stringify(droid);