Ruby provides the json
gem for JSON handling. In earlier versions of Ruby, you have to install this gem yourself; it's part of the base installation from Ruby 1.9.2 and onwards.
If you're running an earlier version of Ruby than Ruby 1.9.2, first install the gem with the following command:
gem install json
Note that Ruby's implementation is in C, so installing the gem may require a C compiler. If you don't have one installed on your system, you can install the pure Ruby implementation of the gem using the following command:
gem install json_pure
Regardless of whether you need to install the gem or not, you'll need to include it in your code. To do this, include both rubygems
and json
or json/pure, depending on which gem you installed; do this using require
, like this:
require 'rubygems' require 'json'
The preceding code handles the former case, while the following code handles the latter:
require 'rubygems' require 'json/pure'