…or ‘two hours of my life I’m not getting back as a result of a daft mistake’ :).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’ve just spent a frustrating \/ puzzling afternoon trying unsuccessfully to parse a JSON dictionary from my own API, using the ‘Get Dictionary Value’ action in Shortcuts. From what I can see, the documentation makes the normally safe assumption that you are working with an API that sets the appropriate content-type for JSON. Back to the shortcut action, the dictionary parsing was just failing silently. I went around the houses on the problem, and when I was working my way through a tutorial that used an external API, I noticed that the JSON result that I got back from hitting the ‘Play’ button for the URL content rendered in a different type of UI element. Your mileage may vary on the appearance, but in dark mode (iOS 14), it renders as a black box. ‘Text\/html’ renders as what looks like a webview, on a white background – which makes perfect retrospective sense, as it’s expecting it to be browser content. …or ‘two hours of my life I’m not getting back as a result of a daft mistake’ :). I’ve just spent a frustrating \/ puzzling afternoon trying unsuccessfully to parse a JSON dictionary from my own API, using the ‘Get … Continue reading
I wasn’t, because I’m using Flask, which defaults to text\/html. The API endpoints I’m using are a couple of years old and, up until today, I’ve been parsing the JSON using both JavaScript and Objective-C<\/a>, neither of which are precious about the mime type. Hence the misconfiguration was at the bottom of my list of things to think about. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Having figured this out, I then jumped on another merry-go-round, trying to avoid ‘double parsing’ – escaped quotes – on a dictionary constructed from variables with the jsonify() method. The data has actually a pretty torturous path before it’s converted to JSON – Flask app route calls an external python script which itself shells out – so I gave up on trying to do it ‘right’. As I need to serve html as well as JSON from the same server instance, I went with this option<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"