Need help parsing Tiled's json export with c++

Questions
1

I’m not too terribly good with JSON yet, this is my first time figuring out. I haven’t found a library that is simple enough for me and good enough to do what I need. I’ve tried rapidjson to some success, but I can’t figure out how to access the layers individually with that.

2

Once you have found a library you can use to parse JSON files, getting the layers would be something like this (taking Qt 5 JSON support as example):

// dummy incomplete json map
QByteArray json("{ \"layers\": [ { \"name\":\"Layer 1\", \"data\":[30, 30] } ] }");

QJsonDocument doc = QJsonDocument::fromJson(json);
QJsonObject map = doc.object();
QJsonArray layers = map.value("layers").toArray();
QJsonObject firstLayer = layers.at(0).toObject();
QJsonArray layerData = firstLayer.value("data").toArray();

QString firstLayerName = firstLayer.value("name").toString();
unsigned firstGlobalTileId = (unsigned) layerData.at(0).toInt();

qDebug() << firstLayerName << firstGlobalTileId;

It outputs:

"Layer 1" 30
3

Qt doesn’t work on my school’s computers. Is there another library or a way to strictly use just the json part of Qt?

4

There is no way to just use the JSON part of Qt, but there are plenty of other JSON libraries out there. But since I never used any, there’s none I can recommend. I’d suggest having a look yourself or maybe just start at http://json.org/, it lists over a dozen C++ libraries (and of course you could use a C library in C++ as well, so you have a lot of choice).

5

I’ve tried all of those, they’re too complicated for what I need.

6

Hmm, could it be that you just don’t know C++ very well yet? It’s not a language I would recommend to start with, unless you first focus for at least a month on just learning the language.

If you really need to do it in C++, I had a short look through the list and JSON++ looked to me like a very sensible one since it doesn’t depend on additional libraries and uses familiar C++ data types like std::map and std::vector. Though since you mention “school’s computers”, I really hope they run Linux. If it’s Windows, maybe this will work for the Flex/Bison dependency: https://sourceforge.net/projects/winflexbison/.