There is no question that the future of parsing in Kotlin will be with kotlinx.serialization. It is part of Kotlin libraries. Version kotlinx.serialization 1.0 is finally released

https://github.com/Kotlin/kotlinx.serialization

import kotlinx.serialization.*
import kotlinx.serialization.json.Json

@Serializable
data class MyModel(val a: Int, @Optional val b: String = "42")

fun main(args: Array<String>) {

    // serializing objects
    val jsonData = Json.encodeToString(MyModel.serializer(), MyModel(42))
    println(jsonData) // {"a": 42, "b": "42"}
    
    // serializing lists
    val jsonList = Json.encodeToString(MyModel.serializer().list, listOf(MyModel(42)))
    println(jsonList) // [{"a": 42, "b": "42"}]

    // parsing data back
    val obj = Json.decodeFromString(MyModel.serializer(), """{"a":42}""")
    println(obj) // MyModel(a=42, b="42")
}

In 2019 no-one is really parsing JSON manually. It's much easier to use Gson library. It takes as an input your object and spits out JSON string and vice-versa.

Example:

data class MyClass(@SerializedName("s1") val s1: Int)

val myClass: MyClass = Gson().fromJson(data, MyClass::class.java)
val outputJson: String = Gson().toJson(myClass)

This way you're not working with JSON string directly but rather with Kotlin object which is type-safe and more convenient. Look at the docs. It's pretty big and easy to understand

Here is some tutorials:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-kcvxYZrB4
• http://www.studytrails.com/java/json/java-google-json-introduction/
• https://www.tutorialspoint.com/gson/index.htm

UPDATE: If you really want to use JSONObject then use its constructor with a string parameter which parses your JSON string automatically.

val jsonObject = JSONObject(data)