CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonjsongoogle-app-engine
Serge Tarkovski
Serge Tarkovski

Reputation: 1889

How to parse somewhat wrong JSON with Python?

I have the following JSON string coming from external input source:

{value: "82363549923gnyh49c9djl239pjm01223", id: 17893}

This is an incorrectly-formatted JSON string ("id" and "value" must be in quotes), but I need to parse it anyway. I have tried simplejson and json-py and seems they could not be set up to parse such strings.

I am running Python 2.5 on Google App engine, so any C-based solutions like python-cjson are not applicable.

Input format could be changed to XML or YAML, in addition to JSON listed above, but I am using JSON within the project and changing format in specific place would not be very good.

Now I've switched to XML and parsing the data successfully, but looking forward to any solution that would allow me to switch back to JSON.

Upvotes: 56

Views: 25353

Answers (5)

null
null

Reputation: 9144

You can use demjson.

>>> import demjson
>>> demjson.decode('{foo:3}')
{u'foo': 3}

Upvotes: 26

Gino Mempin
Gino Mempin

Reputation: 29712

The dirtyjson library can handle some almost-correct JSON:

>>> import dirtyjson
>>> 
>>> s = '{value: "82363549923gnyh49c9djl239pjm01223", id: 17893}'
>>> d = dirtyjson.loads(s)
>>> d
AttributedDict([('value', '82363549923gnyh49c9djl239pjm01223'), ('id', 17893)])
>>>
>>> d = dict(d)
>>> d
{'value': '82363549923gnyh49c9djl239pjm01223', 'id': 17893}
>>> d["value"]
'82363549923gnyh49c9djl239pjm01223'
>>> d["id"]
17893

Upvotes: 3

PaulMcG
PaulMcG

Reputation: 63802

Pyparsing includes a JSON parser example, here is the online source. You could modify the definition of memberDef to allow a non-quoted string for the member name, and then you could use this to parser your not-quite-JSON source text.

[The August, 2008 issue of Python Magazine has a lot more detailed info about this parser. It shows some sample JSON, and code that accesses the parsed results like it was a deserialized object.

Upvotes: 0

mykhal
mykhal

Reputation: 19924

since YAML (>=1.2) is a superset of JSON, you can do:

>>> import yaml
>>> s = '{value: "82363549923gnyh49c9djl239pjm01223", id: 17893}'
>>> yaml.load(s)
{'id': 17893, 'value': '82363549923gnyh49c9djl239pjm01223'}

Upvotes: 64

davidosomething
davidosomething

Reputation: 3437

You could use a string parser to fix it first, a regex could do it provided that this is as complicated as the JSON will get.

Upvotes: 2

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