CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonjsonpython-requests
euri10
euri10

Reputation: 2626

Python requests library: a response returns single quoted JSON

I'm playing a little with Google Places API and requests.

Here is my code:

r = requests.get(self.url, params={'key': KEY, 'location': self.location, 'radius': self.radius, 'types': "airport"}, proxies=proxies)

r returns an HTTP Status 200, fine, but I'm confused by what r.json() returns compared to r.content.

Extract of r.json():

{u'html_attributions': [], u'next_page_token': u'CoQC-QAAABT4REkkX9NCxPWp0JcGK70kT4C-zM70b11btItnXiKLJKpr7l2GeiZeyL5y6NTDQA6ASDonIe5OcCrCsUXbK6W0Y09FqhP57ihFdQ7Bw1pGocLs_nAJodaS4U7goekbnKDlV3TaL8JMr4XpQBvlMN2dPvhFayU6RcF5kwvIm1YtucNOAUk-o4kOOziaJfeLqr3bk_Bq6DoCBwRmSEdZj34RmStdrX5RAirQiB2q_fHd6HPuHQzZ8EfdggqRLxpkFM1iRSnfls9WlgEJDxGB91ILpBsQE3oRFUoGoCfpYA-iW7E3uUD_ufby-JRqxgjD2isEIn8tntmFDjzQmjOraFQSEC6RFpAztLuk7l2ayfXsvw4aFO9gIhcXtG0LPucJkEa2nj3PxUDl', u'results': [{u'geometry': {u'location': {u'lat': -33.939923, u'lng': 151.175276}},

And here is an extract of r.content:

'{\n "html_attributions" : [],\n "next_page_token" : "CoQC-QAAABT4REkkX9NCxPWp0JcGK70kT4C-zM70b11btItnXiKLJKpr7l2GeiZeyL5y6NTDQA6ASDonIe5OcCrCsUXbK6W0Y09FqhP57ihFdQ7Bw1pGocLs_nAJodaS4U7goekbnKDlV3TaL8JMr4Xp

So r.content has the double quotes like a "correct" JSON object, while r.json() seems to have changed all double-quotes in single-quotes.

Should I care about it or not?
I can still access r.json() contents fine, just wondered if this was normal for requests to return an object with single quotes.

Upvotes: 16

Views: 25337

Answers (4)

Linovia
Linovia

Reputation: 20966

Python uses single or double quotes for strings. By default, it'll display single quote for strings. However, JSON specification only consider double quotes to mark strings.

Note that requests' response.json() will return native Python types which are slightly different from their JSON representation you can see with response.content.

Upvotes: 4

chucksmash
chucksmash

Reputation: 5997

You are seeing the single quotes because you are looking at Python, not JSON.

Calling Response.json() attempts to parse the content of the Response as JSON. If it is successful, it will return a combination of dicts, lists and native Python types as @Two-Bit Alchemist alluded to in his comment.

Behind the scenes, The json() method is just calling complexjson.loads() on the response text (see here). If you dig further to look at the requests.compat module to figure out what complexjson is, it is the simplejson package if it is importable on the system (i.e. installed) and the standard library json package otherwise (see here). So, modulo considerations about the encoding, you can read a call to Response.json as equivalent to:

import requests
import json

response = requests.get(...)
json.loads(response.text)

TL;DR

Nothing exciting is happening and no, what is returned from Response.json() is not intended to be valid JSON, but rather valid JSON transformed into Python data structures and types.

Upvotes: 5

glmrenard
glmrenard

Reputation: 705

Just use json.dumps() function in order to serialize a JSON object to a JSON formatted string.

Example:

json_response = json.dumps(requests.get(xxx).json())

Upvotes: 9

Bryan Oakley
Bryan Oakley

Reputation: 385810

The json() method doesn't actually return JSON. It returns a Python object (read: dictionary) that contains the same information as the JSON data. When you print it out, the quotes are added for the sake of readability, they are not actually in your data.

Should I care about it or not?

Not.

Upvotes: 13

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