Looks good. Considered discussing dataclasses/pydantic with json? I found that these go well together More on reddit.com

I read two concrete questions from your post: why you would want to create a JSON object Imagine you want multiple software systems to communicate. Let's say we have three systems, one written in Python, one client written in JavaScript and one more backend system in Java. You can't just send Python objects over a network and expect the systems written in JS or Java to understand them. Same thing the other way around. In the end it's just electrical signals and both the sender and receiver need a common understanding of how to interpret those signals, otherwise they will just be gibberish. That's where data formats like JSON come into play: It's a simple and standardized data format that can be handled in any modern programming language. Now your Python code can serialize its internal representation of a piece of data into this format and send it over a network or store it on some disk, where some other system will eventually pick it up, deserialize it into its own internal representation and process it. show how you would create a JSON object with python import json data = {"year": 2020, "sales": 12345678, "currency": "€"} # creating a JSON string json_string = json.dumps(data) # storing it in a file with open("data.json", "w") as json_file: json.dump(data, json_file) More on reddit.com

I have a feeling you're overthinking this. When you access a value using jq, you look through each level and determine which element you need from the next level. Sometimes, the item is an array, so you access it via its index; sometimes, it's an object, so you access it via its dictionary. Really it's exactly the same with Python, except you would be more explicit with the lookups. In this case, assuming you do only have one Vpc as shown in that JSON, you don't need any loops at all; you can just access it directly: cidr_block = vpc['Vpcs'][0]['CidrBlock'] The outer data structure is a dict, so access it via keys; its Vpc key contains a list, so access that via index; the only item in the list is a dict, so access it via the key you want. The reason why your loop gets the cidr and then fails is because it looks through every key in the outer dictionary; the first one is Vpc, so it works, but the second one is ResponseMetadata whose value is a dict, not a list, so you get the error as you're trying to index it like a list. And no, you don't need to dump it back to JSON; I'm not sure why you think you need to. JSON is a string format, which you can use to send data to and from an API, but you would only ever interact with that data in Python format. More on reddit.com

Nice article. One minor, super-pedantic nit-pick: you keep using the words "JSON object", when you don't really mean that. A "JSON object" is merely one particular type a JSON string or text can hold, as defined by RFC7159 and its update RFC8259 , ECMA262 , ECMA404 , W3C, and various other standards. So you keep describing how to convert to/from "JSON object", when what you're really doing is converting to/from JSON string (which are also python strings) - and those strings actually are of JSON arrays in your examples, not JSON objects. The arrays happen to contain JSON objects inside the array. So for example this: json.dumps() takes in a Python data type and returns a JSON object. json.loads() takes in a JSON object and returns a Python data type. ...isn't actually true. For example just the two characters 42 is a perfectly valid JSON string, of just a JSON number type. Python's json.dumps() will accept a python int of 42 and convert it to a string. It will then take that serialized python/JSON string and convert it back to a simple python int, using json.loads(). There is no JSON object involved whatsoever. Again, I know I'm being pedantic. And I don't mean to criticize - the article's fine overall. I just get triggered by some minor details sometimes. :) More on reddit.com