Playing with JSON input on the Swift playground

JSON-playground.swift

import Foundation

extension String {
    func utf8() -> NSData? { return (self as NSString).dataUsingEncoding(NSUTF8StringEncoding) }
}

extension Optional {
    func flatMap<U>(transform: T -> U?) -> U? {
        if let x = self {
            return transform(x)
        } else {
            return nil
        }
    }
}

func parseJSON(json: NSData) -> AnyObject? {
    return NSJSONSerialization.JSONObjectWithData(json, options: NSJSONReadingOptions(0), error: nil)
}

// Examples:
"{}".utf8().flatMap(parseJSON)
parseJSON("{}".utf8()!)