Golang : How to convert strange string to JSON with json.MarshalIndent

Problem:

Your database is spewing out a funny looking string that looks like this {"width";800;"height";450} and you want to map that string into something like this

 [
 {
 width: 800,
 height: 450,
 }
 ]

You've tried converting the string to byte and decode with json.Unmarshal without luck. Is there a way to convert the string?

Solution:

First, clean up the funny/strange string into something sensible with strings.Replace() function and then format it to JSON with json.MarshalIndent() function. json.MarshalIndent() is to pretty-print the JSON output to multiple lines instead of lumping everything into a single line.

Here you go!

 package main

 import (
  "encoding/json"
  "fmt"
  "os"
  "strings"
 )

 func main() {

  strFromDB := `{"width";800;"height";450}`
  
  // deal with ;
  // change ; to : after "
  dealtWith := strings.Replace(strFromDB, "\";", "\":", -1)
  
 fmt.Println("Converted to : ", dealtWith)

  // trim and split
  noCurlyBraces := strings.Replace(dealtWith, "{", "", -1)
  noCurlyBraces = strings.Replace(noCurlyBraces, "}", "", -1)

  // turn to slice

  strSliceWithQuote := strings.Split(noCurlyBraces, ";")

  fmt.Println("Slice : ", strSliceWithQuote)

  jsonWithQuote, err := json.MarshalIndent(strSliceWithQuote, "", "  ")

  if err != nil {
 fmt.Println(err)
 os.Exit(-1)
  }

  fmt.Println("JSON : \n",string(jsonWithQuote))

 }

Output :

Converted to : {"width":800;"height":450}

Slice : ["width":800 "height":450]

JSON :

[

"\"width\":800",

"\"height\":450"

]