Convert string to array of objects in javascript

Question

I have this string which I get from code behind:

{Name:"Tshirt", CatGroupName:"Clothes", Gender:"male-female"}, {Name:"Dress", CatGroupName:"Clothes", Gender:"female"}, {Name:"Belt", CatGroupName:"Leather", Gender:"child"}

I need to convert it to an array of objects like this:

var Categories = 
[
 {Name:"Tshirt", CatGroupName:"Clothes", Gender:"male-female"},
 {Name:"Dress", CatGroupName:"Clothes", Gender:"female"},
 {Name:"Belt", CatGroupName:"Leather", Gender:"child"}
];

Because I need to perform some functions on it. (like $.grep and so on)

How can I convert it? Thanx in advance.

• Felix Kling: Make your "code behind" generate JSON and then use JSON.parse. Also this is not an associative array, it's an array of objects.
• Matt Burland: How do you get that from the code behind? Because as @FelixKling suggests, you ought to fix that to return actual JSON instead of whatever that's supposed to be. You could try to parse what you have with a regex or something to add the quotes around the property names, but that would be a horrible hack. Fix it at the source.
• Payam Sh: @FelixKling Sorry you're right. It's array of objects.
• Payam Sh: @MattBurland I pass the string to an asp hidden field and read it from jquery. epascarello's answer worked :)
• Felix Kling: @PayamSh: You should still fix the server side if you can and use JSON.parse instead.

Answer 1

The best solution is to make the backend return proper JSON and you do not have to do anything special to process it on the client. To make it valid JSON, you need to wrap the keys with double quotes and wrap the entire string with brackets to make it an array.

BUT if you can not touch the back end, you can use new Function to convert it.

var str = '{Name:"Tshirt", CatGroupName:"Clothes", Gender:"male-female"}, {Name:"Dress", CatGroupName:"Clothes", Gender:"female"}, {Name:"Belt", CatGroupName:"Leather", Gender:"child"}';
var obj = (new Function("return [" + str + "];")());
console.log(obj);

• Stumblor: Interesting solution! Beats using JSON.parse :-)
• Payam Sh: Thanx dear epascarello. Didn't know there's a solution like this!
• epascarello: @Stumblor That is what a lot of the JSON.parse polyfills do under the hood and why the pollyfills normally allow invalid JSON. :)