CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonjsonparsing
biggboss2019
biggboss2019

Reputation: 300

Is it ok if my JSON data is read as List instead of Python Dictionary?

All,

I am new to JSON and python world. I'm trying to parse JSON data located here. I was able to parse JSON data using below code. My question is when I tried to check the type of my 'jsonData' object, it turned out that it is a list instead of Dictionary. Most of JSON data I saw online consists of type dictionary . So it is ok to have list as a type instead of Dictionary ? or do I need to convert my 'jsonData' object into Dictionary, if yes how can I achieve it ?

Code for parsing

response=urllib.request.urlopen(url)
json_string=response.read().decode('utf-8')
parsed_json=json.loads(json_string)
jsonData =parsed_json

Thanks in advance,

Upvotes: 5

Views: 2399

Answers (1)

singleton
singleton

Reputation: 111

Welcome to the JSON and Python world. First things first, you can make the HTTP request and parse the response in fewer lines:

# We will use requests library instead of urllib. See Ref. 1.
import requests

url = 'http://api.population.io/1.0/population/2010/United%20States/?format=json'
response = requests.get(url) # Make an HTTP GET request
jsonData = response.json() # Read the response data in JSON format

print(type(jsonData)) # prints <type 'list'>

for x in jsonData:
    print(type(x)) # prints <type 'dict'>

Why does it say jsonData is a list? Because jsonData is a list.
Why does it say every x is a dictionary? Because every x is a dictionary.

Look closely at the data located here. It starts and ends with [ and ] respectively. Inside the [ and ], there are pairs of { and }.

list = [] # this is how you declare lists in python
dict = {} # this is how you declare dictionaries in python

So, your JSON data is being parsed correctly. It is a JSON list of JSON objects. See Ref. 2.

References:

  1. What are the differences between the urllib, urllib2, and requests module?
  2. https://www.json.org

Upvotes: 4

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