I (unfortunately) have to deserialize a structure ...

# serialization

[kevin.cianfarini]

I (unfortunately) have to deserialize a structure which looks like the following.

"divisions": {
    (key): {
      "name": string,
      "alsoKnownAs": [string],
      "officeIndices": [unsigned integer]
    }
  },

I only care about the value of (key) which is a dynamic string. I was originally deserializing this to a Map<String, String> but for obvious reasons ran into edge cases when the alsoKnownAs and officeIndices fields came back in a response.

Is there a way to deserialize to Any? if I don't care about the actual value here, only the key?

[jw]

JsonElement

[jw]

You could also write a custom serializer and deserialize to Set<String>

[jw]

Easiest way would be to delegate to Map<String, JsonElement> and then call keys

[jw]

Obviously that's a one-way conversion, but I do that all the time and just throw in the serialize codepath

[ephemient]

just tell json to ignore unknown keys. this should work regardless of what's inside ... as long as it's well-formed:

@Serializable data class Structure(
    val divisions: Map<String, Unit>
)

val json = Json {
    ignoreUnknownKeys = true
}
json.decodeFromString<Structure>(
    """
    {
      "divisions": {
        "foo": { ... },
        "bar": { ... }
      }
    }
    """
)

[jw]

It's too bad that's global. Would be nice to opt in only at that specific serializer

[kevin.cianfarini]

Thanks all!