Haskell Data Analysis Cookbook

Examining a JSON file with the aeson package

JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) is a way to represent key-value pairs in plain text. The format is described extensively in RFC 4627 (http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4627).

In this recipe, we will parse a JSON description about a person. We often encounter JSON in APIs from web applications.

Getting ready

Install the aeson library from hackage using Cabal.

Prepare an input.json file representing data about a mathematician, such as the one in the following code snippet:

$ cat input.json

{"name":"Gauss", "nationality":"German", "born":1777, "died":1855}

We will be parsing this JSON and representing it as a usable data type in Haskell.

How to do it...

1. Use the OverloadedStrings language extension to represent strings ...