How to force JSON-lib's JSONObject.put(..) to escape a string containing JSON?
This worked for me with json-lib 2.4:
System.out.println( new JSONStringer() .object() .key("jsonStringValue") .value("{\"hello\":\"world\"}") .key("naturalStringValue") .value("\"hello world\"") .endObject() .toString());
The output is:
{"jsonStringValue":"{\"hello\":\"world\"}","naturalStringValue":"\"hello world\""}
Is that a possible solution for you?
UPDATE:
Revised my answer with a possible solution
Use single quotes to quote the string. From the documentation:
Strings may be quoted with ' (single quote).
Strings do not need to be quoted at all if they do not begin with a quote or single quote, and if they do not contain leading or trailing spaces, and if they do not contain any of these characters: { } [ ] / \ : , = ; # and if they do not look like numbers and if they are not the reserved words true, false, or null.
So modifying your example:
net.sf.json.JSONObject obj = new net.sf.json.JSONObject();obj.put("jsonStringValue","{\"hello\":\"world\"}");obj.put("quotedJsonStringValue","\'{\"hello\":\"world\"}\'");obj.put("naturalStringValue", "\"hello world\"");System.out.println(obj.toString());System.out.println(obj.getString("jsonStringValue"));System.out.println(obj.getString("quotedJsonStringValue"));System.out.println(obj.getString("naturalStringValue"));
Produces:
{"jsonStringValue":{"hello":"world"},"quotedJsonStringValue":"{\"hello\":\"world\"}","naturalStringValue":"\"hello world\""}{"hello":"world"}{"hello":"world"}"hello world"
Note how quotedJsonStringValue
has been treated as a string value and not JSON, and appears quoted in the output JSON.