Convert JSON to Map

I hope you were joking about writing your own parser. 🙂

For such a simple mapping, most tools from http://json.org (section java) would work.
For one of them (Jackson https://github.com/FasterXML/jackson-databind/#5-minute-tutorial-streaming-parser-generator), you’d do:

Map<String,Object> result =
        new ObjectMapper().readValue(JSON_SOURCE, HashMap.class);

(where JSON_SOURCE is a File, input stream, reader, or json content String)