Python 3 Get and parse JSON API

Question

How would I parse a json api response with python? I currently have this:

import urllib.request
import json

url = \'https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/topsto         


        

Answer 1

The only thing missing in the original question is a call to the decode method on the response object (and even then, not for every python3 version). It's a shame no one pointed that out and everyone jumped on a third party library.

Using only the standard library, for the simplest of use cases :

import json
from urllib.request import urlopen


def get(url, object_hook=None):
    with urlopen(url) as resource:  # 'with' is important to close the resource after use
        return json.load(resource, object_hook=object_hook)

Simple use case :

data = get('http://url') # '{ "id": 1, "$key": 13213654 }'
print(data['id']) # 1
print(data['$key']) # 13213654

Or if you prefer, but riskier :

from types import SimpleNamespace

data = get('http://url', lambda o: SimpleNamespace(**o)) # '{ "id": 1, "$key": 13213654 }'
print(data.id) # 1
print(data.$key) # invalid syntax
# though you can still do
print(data.__dict__['$key'])