as-json_skill

Overview

This skill extracts valid JSON from mixed or noisy text and can optionally return specific field values. It strips surrounding prose, code fences, and other noise, then parses and validates the JSON. It can return the whole structure or targeted values, preserving data types.

How this skill works

The skill scans input for JSON structures, removes leading/trailing text and markdown code fences, and parses the first valid JSON blob it finds. If a field parameter is provided it searches the parsed JSON recursively and returns either the first match or all matches based on the all flag. It returns a hard FAIL when no valid JSON is detected and returns note-null when a requested field is not found.

When to use it

• Cleaning LLM responses that include explanations around JSON payloads
• Extracting a single value (e.g., url, title, email) from a JSON blob
• Collecting all occurrences of a repeated field across nested arrays/objects
• Validating that incoming text actually contains parseable JSON before further processing
• Automating ingestion of JSON embedded in markdown or mixed content

Best practices

• Pass only the text region likely to contain JSON to reduce false positives
• Use field + all:true when you need every matching value instead of the first match
• Rely on note-null to handle optional fields gracefully in downstream plans
• Treat a FAIL as a hard error: add retry or fallback logic when JSON may be missing or malformed
• Keep inputs small and focused to improve parsing reliability

Example use cases

• Strip code-fenced JSON from an LLM reply and return the parsed object for downstream processing
• Extract the first occurrence of "url" from API-like responses to collect a canonical link
• Return all "email" fields from a nested contact list with all:true
• Validate that a webhook payload contains JSON before sending it to a handler
• Extract a numeric field like "count" from mixed text for metrics aggregation