How to maintain the order of a JSONObject

I have faced the same problem recently and just transitioned all our tests (which expect JSON attributes to be in the same order) to another JSON library:

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.codehaus.jettison</groupId>
    <artifactId>jettison</artifactId>
    <version>1.3.5</version>
</dependency>

Internally it uses a LinkedHashMap, which maintains the order of attributes. This library is functionally equivalent to the json.org library, so I don't see any reason why not use it instead, at least for tests.

try this

JSONObject jsonObject = new JSONObject(jsonString) {
    /**
     * changes the value of JSONObject.map to a LinkedHashMap in order to maintain
     * order of keys.
     */
    @Override
    public JSONObject put(String key, Object value) throws JSONException {
        try {
            Field map = JSONObject.class.getDeclaredField("map");
            map.setAccessible(true);
            Object mapValue = map.get(this);
            if (!(mapValue instanceof LinkedHashMap)) {
                map.set(this, new LinkedHashMap<>());
            }
        } catch (NoSuchFieldException | IllegalAccessException e) {
            throw new RuntimeException(e);
        }
        return super.put(key, value);
    }
};
jsonObject.remove("owner");
jsonString=jsonObject.toString();