java - What’s the best way to load a JSONObject from a json text file?

Question

What would be the easiest way to load a file containing JSON into a JSONObject.

At the moment I am using json-lib.

This is what I have, but it throws an exception:

XMLSerializer xml = new XMLSerializer();
JSON json = xml.readFromFile("samples/sample7.json”);     //line 507
System.out.println(json.toString(2));

The output is:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException
    at java.io.Reader.<init>(Reader.java:61)
    at java.io.InputStreamReader.<init>(InputStreamReader.java:55)
    at net.sf.json.xml.XMLSerializer.readFromStream(XMLSerializer.java:386)
    at net.sf.json.xml.XMLSerializer.readFromFile(XMLSerializer.java:370)
    at corebus.test.deprecated.TestMain.main(TestMain.java:507)

Answer 1

Thanks @Kit Ho for your answer. I used your code and found that I kept running into errors where my InputStream was always null and ClassNotFound exceptions when the JSONObject was being created. Here's my version of your code which does the trick for me:

import java.io.File;
import java.io.FileInputStream;
import java.io.InputStream;
import org.apache.commons.io.IOUtils;

import org.json.JSONObject;
public class JSONParsing {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        File f = new File("file.json");
        if (f.exists()){
            InputStream is = new FileInputStream("file.json");
            String jsonTxt = IOUtils.toString(is, "UTF-8");
            System.out.println(jsonTxt);
            JSONObject json = new JSONObject(jsonTxt);       
            String a = json.getString("1000");
            System.out.println(a);   
        }
    }
}

I found this answer to be enlightening about the difference between FileInputStream and getResourceAsStream. Hope this helps someone else too.