json

Meandering through JSON with Optics

11 minute read Published: 2022-02-12

When working with third-party services, one is more likely than not to end up parsing a JSON document. For well-behaved APIs, documentation and examples are available, so the job usually becomes some minor variation of:

  1. Reach for the "canonical" JSON parsing library in your language
  2. Grab some example JSON and do some ad-hoc parsing of the bits you're interested in,
  3. Maybe write a class/type/module/namespace to immortalize adapting said JSON data to your domain, hopefully with accompanying tests.
  4. Think everything is okay, until some live data comes in with missing keys (or extra keys!) inconsistent types (nulls where they promised they wouldn't show up, invalid date formats, etc.)
  5. Go back to step 2 with the newfound edge cases, adapt.

Sometimes it's a quick process: couple of caveats you missed in the documentation, sometimes it's painstaking; the ability to close the loop in a fast, but robust, manner becomes invaluable: you don't want to spend days, and a lot of boilerplate, only to discover that some deep details didn't really work out. I believe a good type system and a good parser help a lot, but the last mile is all about the "getting to the bits of data relevant to your domain." Optics are my tool of choice for that.