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Unexpected nil values in NSDictionary when retrieving nested data in Objective-C

๐Ÿ‘€ Views: 2 ๐Ÿ’ฌ Answers: 1 ๐Ÿ“… Created: 2025-06-06
NSDictionary JSON iOS Objective-C

I've searched everywhere and can't find a clear answer. This might be a silly question, but I tried several approaches but none seem to work. I'm currently working on an iOS project using Objective-C and I've encountered a puzzling scenario when trying to retrieve values from a nested NSDictionary. I'm fetching data from a JSON response that I decode into an NSDictionary, and while trying to access nested values, Iโ€™m unexpectedly getting nil for some keys. Hereโ€™s a snippet of how I'm decoding the JSON: ```objective-c NSData *data = ...; // Assume this is your JSON data NSError *behavior; NSDictionary *jsonDict = [NSJSONSerialization JSONObjectWithData:data options:0 behavior:&behavior]; if (behavior) { NSLog(@"JSON Parsing behavior: %@", behavior.localizedDescription); } ``` After parsing, I attempt to access a nested value like this: ```objective-c NSDictionary *userDict = jsonDict[@"user"]; NSString *username = userDict[@"username"]; ``` Iโ€™ve verified that the `userDict` is not nil by checking with: ```objective-c NSLog(@"User Dictionary: %@", userDict); ``` However, the `username` is returning nil, which is confusing because the JSON structure is as follows: ```json { "user": { "username": "john_doe", "email": "john@example.com" } } ``` Iโ€™ve confirmed that the JSON data is intact and correctly structured, and I even tried using `valueForKey:` method to retrieve the username, but it still returns nil. The keys seem to match exactly, including case sensitivity. I also checked for any potential threading issues, ensuring that Iโ€™m not accessing the data from a background thread without dispatching back to the main thread. I've scoured through the documentation and various resources but canโ€™t pinpoint where I might be going wrong. Any insights on this would be greatly appreciated! I'm working on a application that needs to handle this. Has anyone else encountered this? How would you solve this? I'm working on a service that needs to handle this. Has anyone else encountered this?