CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonjsonpython-2.7
Daniel
Daniel

Reputation: 2469

Nulls, instead of Nones, in JSON Data with Python

I'm working with the following data:

[{"title": null, "metric1": 361429, "metric2": 36,},{"title": null, "metric1": 253798, "metric2": 48}]

When I attempt to assign this data to a variable in Python (with the aim of parsing it out), I receive the following error message:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
NameError: name 'null' is not defined

From my research, it appears that the None is Python's null. What I'm wondering is, is it possible to change the null's in my data to None's using Python?

I've tried creating a string out of the data, assigning it to data, and replacing the null's that way:

data = data.replace('null','None')

but that results in a string of the data itself:

data = '[{"title": None, "metric1": 361429, "metric2": 36,},{"title": None, "metric1": 253798, "metric2": 48}]'

and I can't figure out how to turn it from a string back into JSON.

EDIT: I am copying and pasting this data into the Python interpreter from a separate source.

Upvotes: 18

Views: 43185

Answers (2)

Oliver W.
Oliver W.

Reputation: 13459

Much simpler!

Just assign None to null before assigning that list to a variable:

null = None
var = [{"title": null, "metric1": 361429, "metric2": 36,},{"title": null, "metric1": 253798, "metric2": 48}]

Then you won't need to do the rather unnecessary conversion to a string (and back to a Python object with json.loads) only to replace null by None.

But that is only really necessary if you're copy-pasting that code from some source. Otherwise, the canonical answer is to use json.loads (or json.load).

Upvotes: 49

levi
levi

Reputation: 22707

As is mentioned above, you don't need to replace "null" for "None"

Just

import json
parsed_data = json.loads(data)

Upvotes: 14

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