Parsing nested json with python

Question

After submitting a request I have received the following json back:

{"type": [
{"ID": "all", "count": 1, "references": [
    { "id": "Boston,MA,02118", "text": "Boston,MA,02118", "val": "Boston,MA,02118", "type": 1 ,"zip": "02118","city": "Boston","state": "MA","lt": "42.3369","lg": "-71.0637","s": ""}
] }
] }

I captured the response in variable j ,

>>> j
'{"type": [\r\n\t{"ID": "all", "count": 1, "references": [\r\n\t\t{ "id": "Boston,MA,02118", "text": "Boston,MA,02118", "val": "Boston,MA,02118", "type": 1 ,"zip": "02118","city": "Boston","state": "MA","lt": "42.3369","lng": "-71.0637","s": ""}\r\n\t] }\r\n] }'

and am trying to parse it:

>>> j['types']
TypeError: string indices must be integers, not str

What am I doing wrong?

abarnert · Accepted Answer · 2014-08-03 11:14:04Z

5

You've got a JSON string representation of a dictionary. But you're trying to use that string as a dictionary. That won't work; you need to parse it first, using the json module:

import json
obj = json.loads(j)
obj['types']

(There are libraries that can wrap up the whole "send a request, get a response, pull the body out of the response, make sure the content-type is right for JSON, parse it, raise an exception if anything goes wrong" for you. But if you're not using one, you can't skip any of the steps.)

answered Aug 3, 2014 at 11:14

abarnert

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3 Comments

Flily Hsu Over a year ago

I think he also misspell the key type

abarnert Over a year ago

@FlilyHsuL Yeah, I think you're right. But at least he'll get a KeyError instead of a TypeError, and hopefully that'll be easier to understand. (Or, hopefully, he'll read your comment…)

user1592380 Over a year ago

Thank you, but that was just a typo - Bill

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