Importing Data From Ning – July 26, 2013 (read more)

I have a customer who is trying to move their website from ning.com to a new web hosting provider, and ning supposedly provides a method for exporting the data, but they acknowledge that their data format is broken, and so requires manually editing to make it readable by other parsers.  They bug they know about is that the ning files start and end with extraneous parentheses, and so those have to be removed prior to reading by any JSON parser.  You'd think that Ning could remove those parentheses, but perhaps this is their goal - to not let people leave their service after starting with them.  If that is the case, then I'm sorry to say that I'll be wrecking their business model by showing you how to get your data out of Ning...