---
title: "JSON parsing with ruby one-liner?"
description: "Parsing JSON is one of the most common tasks that any web developer does. Here’s how to do it with Ruby one-liners in JS."
url: "https://h3manth.com/scribe/json-parsing-with-ruby-one-liner/"
canonical_url: "https://h3manth.com/scribe/json-parsing-with-ruby-one-liner/"
markdown_url: "https://h3manth.com/scribe/blog/json-parsing-with-ruby-one-liner.md"
publishDate: "2012-05-17T00:00:00.000Z"
author: "Hemanth HM"
category: "ruby"
tags: ["ruby"]
word_count: 329
reading_time_minutes: 2
x_markdown_tokens: 821
content_signal: "ai-train=yes, search=yes, ai-input=yes"
---

# JSON parsing with ruby one-liner?

> Parsing JSON is one of the most common tasks that any web developer does. Here’s how to do it with Ruby one-liners in JS.

Parsing JSON is one of the most common tasks that any web developer does in his daily activities.

Parsing `JSON` with `ruby` is fun and the fun multiples `n.times` when the code is a **one-liner**!

Indeed some gems are needed along with ruby and rubygems, you shall need:

```bash
gem install rest-client
```

With all the above gems, begins the fun! Say you have a simple json that gives the IP of your machine unlike [http://h3manth.com/ip.php](http://h3manth.com/ip.php "my ip api") which was specifically designed for jsonp!

So say the json string is like `{ip:192.71.223.65}`

Using the simple ruby one-liner below, this is what happens with that json:

```ruby
require 'rubygems'
require 'json'
require 'rest-client' 

json_ip_url = "http://ifconfig.me/all.json"
# The killer one line ruby json parsing! 

ip_details = JSON.parse(RestClient.get(json_ip_url))
```

The json from the URL looks like:

```json
{
    "connection": "keep-alive",
    "ip_addr": "192.71.223.65",
    "lang": "en-US,en;q=0.8",
    "remote_host": "NSG-Static-066.223.71.182.airtel.in",
    "user_agent": "Mozilla/5.0",
    "charset": "ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.3",
    "port": "4532",
    "via": "",
    "forwarded": "",
    "mime": "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9",
    "keep_alive": "",
    "encoding": "gzip,deflate,sdch"
}
```

And the killer ruby one line JSON parser `JSON.parse(RestClient.get(json_ip_url))` returns a wonderful hash like:

```ruby
{
    "connection" => "", 
    "ip_addr" => "192.71.223.65",
    "lang" => "", 
    "remote_host" => "NSG-Static-066.223.71.182.airtel.in", 
    "user_agent" => "Ruby", 
    "charset" => "", 
    "port" => "24436", 
    "via" => "", 
    "forwarded" => "", 
    "mime" => "*/*; q=0.5, application/xml", 
    "keep_alive" => "", 
    "encoding" => "gzip, deflate"
}
```

With that, one can just use `ip_details["json_key"]` to get the required details!

Let's try something more, one liners are always fun and when it's ruby and the web, it's more fun!

**Let's get the top three images from Google image search!**

```ruby
#!/usr/bin/env ruby 

require 'rubygems'
require 'json'
require 'rest-client' 
require 'uri'

def get_imgs(term)
  url = 'https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/search/images?v=1.0&q=' + URI.escape(term)
  imgs = JSON.parse(RestClient.get(url))
  for img in imgs["responseData"]["results"]
      puts img["url"]
  end   
end

=begin

get_imgs("yoda") would print:

http://images.wikia.com/starwars/images/e/e0/Yoda_SWSB.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/9/96/CGIYoda.jpg/200px-CGIYoda.jpg
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2010/10/06/article-1318093-0B803914000005DC-954_306x423.jpg
http://altjapan.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341bfd2253ef00e55426d7bb8834-320wi

=end
```

**So far this has been my best way of parsing JSON with ruby, what's yours?**

**Edit:** Define one-liner? :D It must have been JSON parsing in a line, right?