Manually Parsing a a JSON into an Object of a Struct - swift

Question

I'm a beginner in swift and I'm currently making an app that makes a web request. I've been trying to parse this JSON Data but the nested data is just really hard to wrap my head around:
"abilities": [
{
"ability": {
"name": "chlorophyll",
"url": "https://pokeapi.co/api/v2/ability/34/"
},
"is_hidden": true,
"slot": 3
},
{
"ability": {
"name": "overgrow",
"url": "https://pokeapi.co/api/v2/ability/65/"
},
"is_hidden": false,
"slot": 1
}
]
JSon Serialization Code
let jsonAny = try JSONSerialization.jsonObject(with: data, options: [])
guard let json = jsonAny as? [String: Any] else { return }
This is my attempt to manually parse the JSON Data
private func parsePokemonManual(json: [String: Any]) -> Pokemon {
let abilities = json["abilities"] as? [String: Any] ?? [String: Any]()
return Pokemon(abilities: abilities)
}
}
These are the structs that I made to hold the data.
struct Abilities {
let ability : Ability
struct Ability {
let name : String
}
}
How do I successfully parse the JSON Data into an object of Pokemon structure?
With this code so fat I am getting the error "Cannot convert the value of type '[String : Any]' to expected argument type '[Abilities]'. My problem is that I don't know what type to cast the abilities as and that my struct 'Abilities' is also incorrect.

Answer 1

There are 3 problems with your attempt although one might argue there is only 1, that you should use Codable instead but lets stay with JSONSerialization here. The problems are
You are reading the json wrong and should cast not to a dictionary but an array of dictionaries when accessing "abilities"
Your struct is to complicated, maybe because of the previous problem
Lastly, you can't cast into a custom type, you need to convert or map the data into your type by telling exactly what values to use and how because the compiler doesn't understand how to do it.
First the struct can be simplified to
struct Ability {
let name : String
}
And the rest is fixed in the function parsePokemonManual. First get "abilities" and cast to an array of dictionaries. Then map each item in the array by getting "ability" and casting it to a dictionary that is used to get the "name" value that is then used when creating an instance of Ability
private func parsePokemonManual(json: [String: Any]) -> [Ability] {
guard let abilities = json["abilities"] as? [[String: Any]] else {
return []
}
return abilities.compactMap { dict in
guard let ability = dict["ability"] as? [String: String], let name = ability["name"] else { return nil }
return Ability(name: name)
}
}