Are there options with Json.NET that can have it deserialize inconsistent json types into objects?

Question

An example would be that I am consuming json from an api. The api is not consistent in how it returns the json. Say you have an Author and it has a property of Books[]. The api is unfortunately choosing to return Author.Books (of type Book) in cases when there is only one book. The prefered method would be to return just one Book inside Author.Books[].

Json.NET understandably throws a serialization exception when I try to have it deserialize a chunk of json and it finds "Author":{"Book":{... mixed in with "Author":{"Book":["...

Is there a way around this?

possible duplicate of [Deserializing JSON when sometimes array and sometimes object](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5224697/deserializing-json-when-sometimes-array-and-sometimes-object) — Robert MacLean, Aug 03 '12 at 12:33

score 7 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:25

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Deserializing JSON when sometimes array and sometimes object

edited May 23 '17 at 12:25

Community

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answered Apr 29 '11 at 07:27

James Newton-King

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thank you + up vote, plus upvote in the other threads as well. Great stuff James.. – Roger Apr 29 '11 at 16:50

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 29 '11 at 07:17

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I guess the best would be fix the json through a regex replace before sending to the deserializer. If you put here a full sample of a json provided by the API, and a json accepted, i could make the regex for you.

answered Apr 29 '11 at 07:17

ariel

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Are there options with Json.NET that can have it deserialize inconsistent json types into objects?

2 Answers2