The org.json library is easy to use.

Just remember (while casting or using methods like getJSONObject and getJSONArray) that in JSON notation

• [ … ] represents an array, so library will parse it to JSONArray
• { … } represents an object, so library will parse it to JSONObject

Example code below:

import org.json.*;

String jsonString = ... ; //assign your JSON String here
JSONObject obj = new JSONObject(jsonString);
String pageName = obj.getJSONObject("pageInfo").getString("pageName");

JSONArray arr = obj.getJSONArray("posts"); // notice that `"posts": [...]`
for (int i = 0; i < arr.length(); i++)
{
    String post_id = arr.getJSONObject(i).getString("post_id");
    ......
}

You may find more examples from: Parse JSON in Java

Downloadable jar: http://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.json/json

The whole file is an array and there are objects and other arrays (e.g. cars) in the whole array of the file.

As you say, the outermost layer of your JSON blob is an array. Therefore, your parser will return a JSONArray. You can then get JSONObjects from the array ...

  JSONArray a = (JSONArray) parser.parse(new FileReader("c:\\exer4-courses.json"));

  for (Object o : a)
  {
    JSONObject person = (JSONObject) o;

    String name = (String) person.get("name");
    System.out.println(name);

    String city = (String) person.get("city");
    System.out.println(city);

    String job = (String) person.get("job");
    System.out.println(job);

    JSONArray cars = (JSONArray) person.get("cars");

    for (Object c : cars)
    {
      System.out.println(c+"");
    }
  }

For reference, see "Example 1" on the json-simple decoding example page.