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Semi-structured Data Functions (Parsing)
TRY_PARSE_JSONΒΆ
A special version of PARSE_JSON that returns a NULL value if an error occurs during parsing.
SyntaxΒΆ
TRY_PARSE_JSON( <expr> )
ArgumentsΒΆ
expr
An expression of string type (e.g. VARCHAR).
ReturnsΒΆ
The returned value is of type VARIANT
and contains a JSON document.
Usage NotesΒΆ
This function supports an input expression with a maximum size of 8 MB compressed.
If the input is NULL, the output is also NULL. However, if the input string is
'null'
, it is interpreted as a JSON null value so that the result is not SQL NULL, but a valid VARIANT value containingnull
.When parsing decimal numbers, this function attempts to preserve exactness of the representation by treating 123.45 as NUMBER(5,2), not as a DOUBLE. However, numbers using scientific notation (e.g. 1.2345e+02) or numbers that cannot be stored as fixed-point decimals due to range or scale limitations are stored as DOUBLE. Because JSON does not represent values such as TIMESTAMP, DATE, TIME, or BINARY natively, these have to be represented as strings.
In JSON, an object (also called a βdictionaryβ or a βhashβ) is an unordered set of key-value pairs.
TO_JSON
andTRY_PARSE_JSON
are (almost) converse or reciprocal functions.The
TRY_PARSE_JSON
function takes a string as input and returns a JSON-compatible variant. TheTO_JSON
function takes a JSON-compatible variant and returns a string. The following is (conceptually) true if X is a string containing valid JSON:X = TO_JSON(TRY_PARSE_JSON(X));
For example, the following is (conceptually) true:
'{"pi":3.14,"e":2.71}' = TO_JSON(TRY_PARSE_JSON('{"pi":3.14,"e":2.71}'))
However, the functions are not perfectly reciprocal for two reasons:
The order of the key-value pairs in the string produced by
TO_JSON
is not predictable.The string produced by
TO_JSON
can have less whitespace than the string passed toTRY_PARSE_JSON
.
The following are equivalent JSON, but not equivalent strings:
{"pi": 3.14, "e": 2.71}
{"e":2.71,"pi":3.14}
ExamplesΒΆ
This shows an example of storing different types of data in a VARIANT column by calling TRY_PARSE_JSON
to parse
strings that contain values that can be parsed as JSON:
Create and fill a table.
create or replace temporary table vartab (ID INTEGER, v VARCHAR); insert into vartab (id, v) VALUES (1, '[-1, 12, 289, 2188, false,]'), (2, '{ "x" : "abc", "y" : false, "z": 10} '), (3, '{ "bad" : "json", "missing" : true, "close_brace": 10 ');Query the data, using
TRY_PARSE_JSON
. Note that the value for the third line is NULL. If the query had usedPARSE_JSON
rather thanTRY_PARSE_JSON
, the query would have failed.SELECT ID, try_parse_json(v) FROM vartab ORDER BY ID; +----+-------------------+ | ID | TRY_PARSE_JSON(V) | |----+-------------------| | 1 | [ | | | -1, | | | 12, | | | 289, | | | 2188, | | | false, | | | undefined | | | ] | | 2 | { | | | "x": "abc", | | | "y": false, | | | "z": 10 | | | } | | 3 | NULL | +----+-------------------+