So I have a JSON string that I want to parse into a JSON object:

    {:wagon_name=>"32155", :assembly_names=>[]}

But it’s not parsing: are there any ruby/rails developers who can see why?

I couldn’t for the life of me work it out. The only clue that I had was this:

SyntaxError: Unexpected token in object literal (line 3, file “Code”)

So it seems that there was something wrong with the JSON object. But how, and where?

ENTER: JLint

JLint tells you what’s wrong.

I found a lovely online JLint site - here: and then I immediately realised that I was using a ruby hash rather than a JSON object. Doh!

This illustrates the importance of testing every step of the way!

HTH