How to de-serialize a Map with GSON

Question

i am fairly new to GSON and get a JSON response of this format (just an easier example, so the values make no sense):

{
    "Thomas": {
        "age": 32,
        "surname": "Scott"
    },
    "Andy": {
        "age": 25,
        "surname": "Miller"
    }
}

I want GSON to make it a Map, PersonData is obviously an Object. The name string is the identifier for the PersonData.

As I said I am very new to GSON and only tried something like:

Gson gson = new Gson();
Map decoded = gson.fromJson(jsonString, new TypeToken>(){}.getType());

but this threw the error:

Exception in thread "main" com.google.gson.JsonSyntaxException: java.lang.IllegalStateException: Expected BEGIN_ARRAY but was STRING at line 1 column 3141

Any help is appreciated :)

How to de-serialize a Map<String, Object> with GSON

2 Answers