Reading/Understanding JSON to set a variable

[josh]

Yes. Each ‘branch’ in the tree needs a . between it. In each of those cases, you are directly accessing a property (or branch) under the previously expanded item.

{"current": { "temp": 70.2 } } → current.temp → 70.2

You only need the numeric indexes when there is a ‘list’ of items (array) which in the raw JSON is indicated by square brackets. And you have to access those by their zero-based index.

{"items": ["first", "second"] } → items[0] → "first"

Here’s a comment from another post with a primitive example:

@josh

In object property property notation, each ‘child’ property is accessed with a . and arrays are normally accessed with brackets [n] where n is the index (0 based) of the item.

Let’s take a simpler example:

{
   "animal": {
      "type": "cat",
      "colors": ["red", "orange"] 
   }
}

We would access the type as animal.type.

We could get the list (array) of colors as animal.colors but if we only wanted to get the first color, we would normally access it as animal.colors[0] and if we wanted the second color we would use animal.colors[1] (remember that indexes are 0 based with JSON objects)

Hopefully that arbitrary example helps explain and doesn’t just make things more confusing.