How to implement 'NoMethodError: undefined method `[]' for nil:NilClass' when using JSON.parse in Ruby 3.1?
Quick question that's been bugging me - I'm trying to implement I'm having trouble with I tried several approaches but none seem to work..... I'm working with a frustrating scenario with parsing JSON in Ruby 3.1. I have the following code that attempts to parse a JSON response from an external API: ```ruby require 'json' response = '{"data": {"id": 1, "name": "Sample"}}' parsed_response = JSON.parse(response) puts parsed_response['data']['name'] ``` While this works perfectly when the API returns a valid JSON response, I sometimes get a `NoMethodError: undefined method '[]' for nil:NilClass` behavior. I've checked the API documentation, and it states that in some cases, the `data` field might not be present in the response due to certain conditions. To handle this, I tried using `dig` like this: ```ruby name = parsed_response.dig('data', 'name') puts name ``` However, when `data` is missing, `dig` returns `nil`, and I would like to provide a default value instead of printing `nil`. I attempted this: ```ruby name = parsed_response.dig('data', 'name') || 'Default Name' puts name ``` While it seems to work, I'm still worried about potential edge cases where the response structure might change unexpectedly. Am I handling this correctly? Is there a more robust way to deal with optional fields in JSON parsing to avoid unexpected errors? Also, what would you suggest for validating the structure of the JSON response before trying to access its contents? Any best practices would be greatly appreciated! For reference, this is a production mobile app. What am I doing wrong? This is happening in both development and production on macOS.