How to convert a string to an array in javascript?

Question

I have an input on a form which stores values as an object.

jQuery('#inputId').val()

returns something like

'[{"Id":"123","Name":"A","PathOfTerm":"A","Children":[],"Level":0,"RawTerm":null},{"Id":"234","Name":"B","PathOfTerm":"B","Children":[],"Level":0,"RawTerm":null}]'

as one single string. Is there any way to either prevent this from automatically converting to a string (maybe not using .val?) or to convert this from a string to something I could work with?

• David R: So you want to have it as a object ?
• thedude: you could JSON.parse this
• George: Looks like it's returning JSON. Lucky for you most browsers have the function JSON.parse to convert it to an object
• J. Titus: Possible duplicate of Parse JSON in JavaScript?
• jeffdill2: Possible duplicate of Convert JSON string to array of JSON objects in Javascript

Answer 1

Here you go

var array = JSON.parse(jQuery('#inputId').val());