CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonjsongoogle-app-engine
Sergei Basharov
Sergei Basharov

Reputation: 53938

Parsing JSON data with Python

I receive some data from a GitHub webhook service. It contains info about recent commits in a repository. String I receive looks like this:

payload = {
    "ref":"refs/heads/master","commits":[
        {"added":[],"author":{"username":"myname","email":"[email protected]","name":"John Doe"},"timestamp":"2011-03-03T02:04:32-08:00","removed":[],"url":"https://github.com/repository/commit/3da6de4ae4550aa84ff16b9b52d8c5179e126dc5","message":"Setup some functions","modified":["apps/api/__init__.py","main.py","utils.py"],"id":"3da6de4ae4550aa84ff16b9b52d8c5179e126dc5"}
    ],
    "compare":"https://github.com/repository/compare/a270fe9...eb26a23","after":"eb26a2312e1955ccb2b7cb50d43682be87c30faa","repository":{"pushed_at":"2011/03/03 02:23:14 -0800","has_issues":true,"has_downloads":true,"url":"https://github.com/repository","watchers":1,"fork":false,"has_wiki":true,"private":false,"size":2248,"forks":1,"created_at":"2011/02/23 04:41:51 -0800","owner":{"email":"[email protected]","name":"john"},"name":"john","language":"Python","open_issues":0},"forced":false,"before":"a270fe954359caa323a9880afc3d6301055ea566"
}

What is the right way to remove that variable payload= and get only the data between {} so that it would be a correct JSON that I can parse with simplejson? Now I just use json_data = json_data.replace('payload=', ''). I am not sure it's a right way to do this. How can I do it a better way? Thanks.

UPDATE I posted a message on GitHub support board with the issue description.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1548

Answers (2)

Nico
Nico

Reputation: 2663

There's no single "right" way of doing it, unless you want to implement a complete JS parser. That said, the solution suggested by Thomas is more generalizable, eg. less likely to break if github decides to change the format of the file, if you use it on a different data source, etc.

Upvotes: 1

Thomas K
Thomas K

Reputation: 40390

I would look for the first { character:

jsondata = jsondata[jsondata.index("{"):]

Upvotes: 6

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