Using JSON

JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation and is a definition for a very lightweight format for transmitting data through object serialization. This means that the message we received from the Google Places API is actually a set of objects. All we need to do is properly parse these objects, and it will be a simple matter to understand the search results. Unity does actually have a built-in JSON library; but, at the time of writing this book, it could not parse the Google Places API response. Fortunately, there are plenty of resources available to parse JSON.

Since the Unity engine could not effectively parse the response, it was decided to use a library called TinyJson. TinyJson is another open source library pulled from GitHub, but parts had to be rewritten in order to support the iOS platform. However, a couple calls to the System.Linq namespace were left in. If you plan to run this code on an iOS device, make sure that your scripting backend is set to IL2CPP.

Note

As we mentioned...