The object contains strings with JSON encoding. Each element in the list referenced by the list key is a string object, that happens to hold valid JSON data. By using json.dumps() you encoded those strings to JSON values, so the use of backslashes is entirely correct; it is opaque data otherwise, it doesn't matter to the JSON encoder that the data is itself also valid JSON.
That those elements are JSON strings is probably an error on the side of the service you called. You now need to undo that mistake by decoding those JSON strings first:
response = client.get_products()
response['list'] = [json.loads(s) for s in response['list']]
with open('file.json', 'w') as output:
json.dump(response, output)
If you also are responsible for the API output, fix that output. Don't double-encode your data.
As you discovered, using str() does not produce JSON output. That produces a Python representation, using valid Python syntax.
Format of a JSON response with Python - Stack Overflow
python - How to prettyprint a JSON file? - Stack Overflow
formatting json output in Python
python - What's the best way to parse a JSON response from the requests library? - Stack Overflow
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Use the indent= parameter of json.dump() or json.dumps() to specify how many spaces to indent by:
>>> import json
>>> your_json = '["foo", {"bar": ["baz", null, 1.0, 2]}]'
>>> parsed = json.loads(your_json)
>>> print(json.dumps(parsed, indent=4))
[
"foo",
{
"bar": [
"baz",
null,
1.0,
2
]
}
]
To parse a file, use json.load():
with open('filename.txt', 'r') as handle:
parsed = json.load(handle)
You can do this on the command line:
python3 -m json.tool some.json
(as already mentioned in the commentaries to the question, thanks to @Kai Petzke for the python3 suggestion).
Actually python is not my favourite tool as far as json processing on the command line is concerned. For simple pretty printing is ok, but if you want to manipulate the json it can become overcomplicated. You'd soon need to write a separate script-file, you could end up with maps whose keys are u"some-key" (python unicode), which makes selecting fields more difficult and doesn't really go in the direction of pretty-printing.
You can also use jq:
jq . some.json
and you get colors as a bonus (and way easier extendability).
Addendum: There is some confusion in the comments about using jq to process large JSON files on the one hand, and having a very large jq program on the other. For pretty-printing a file consisting of a single large JSON entity, the practical limitation is RAM. For pretty-printing a 2GB file consisting of a single array of real-world data, the "maximum resident set size" required for pretty-printing was 5GB (whether using jq 1.5 or 1.6). Note also that jq can be used from within python after pip install jq.
Hi,
I would like to read json into Python code, and then output processed json. In order to get started with this, I have written very basic Python, and am attempting to read in very basic json I found online.
The input json is:
{
"firstName": "John",
"lastName": "Doe",
"hobbies": ["biking", "coding", "rapping"],
"age": 35,
"children": [
{
"firstName": "hector",
"age": 6
},
{
"firstName": "cassandra",
"age": 8
}
]
}The code is:
import json
if __name__ == '__main__':
print( "start" )
# read and load input json
json_input_filename = "input.json"
json_input = open( json_input_filename )
json_input_dict = json.load( json_input )
# write output json
json_output_filename = "output.json"
with open( json_output_filename, 'w' ) as json_output:
json.dump( json_string, json_output )
print( f"end" )and the output is:
"{\"firstName\": \"John\", \"lastName\": \"Doe\", \"hobbies\": [\"biking\", \"coding\", \"rapping\"], \"age\": 35, \"children\": [{\"firstName\": \"hector\", \"age\": 6}, {\"firstName\": \"cassandra\", \"age\": 8}]}"What can I do in order to preserve something resembling the original formatting? I'm going to load this output into some other code in order to process it further.
Thank you very much
Since you're using requests, you should use the response's json method.
import requests
response = requests.get(...)
data = response.json()
It autodetects which decoder to use.
You can use json.loads:
import json
import requests
response = requests.get(...)
json_data = json.loads(response.text)
This converts a given string into a dictionary which allows you to access your JSON data easily within your code.
Or you can use @Martijn's helpful suggestion, and the higher voted answer, response.json().