Create a Pandas DataFrame from deeply nested JSON

Question

I\'m trying to create a single Pandas DataFrame object from a deeply nested JSON string.

The JSON schema is:

{\"intervals\": [
{
pivots: \"Jane Smit         


        

Answer 1

I think organizing your data in way that yields repeating column names is only going to create headaches for you later on down the road. A better approach IMHO is to create a column for each of pivots, interval_id, and p_value. This will make extremely easy to query your data after loading it into pandas.

Also, your JSON has some errors in it. I ran it through this to find the errors.

jq helps here

import sh
jq = sh.jq.bake('-M')  # disable colorizing
json_data = "from above"
rule = """[{pivots: .intervals[].pivots, 
            interval_id: .intervals[].series[].interval_id,
            p_value: .intervals[].series[].p_value}]"""
out = jq(rule, _in=json_data).stdout
res = pd.DataFrame(json.loads(out))

This will yield output similar to

    interval_id       p_value      pivots
32            2  2.867501e-06  Jane Smith
33            2  1.000000e+00  Jane Smith
34            2  1.116279e-08  Jane Smith
35            2  2.867501e-06  Jane Smith
36            0  1.000000e+00   Bob Smith
37            0  1.116279e-08   Bob Smith
38            0  2.867501e-06   Bob Smith
39            0  1.000000e+00   Bob Smith
40            0  1.116279e-08   Bob Smith
41            0  2.867501e-06   Bob Smith
42            1  1.000000e+00   Bob Smith
43            1  1.116279e-08   Bob Smith

Adapted from this comment

Of course, you can always call res.drop_duplicates() to remove the duplicate rows. This gives

In [175]: res.drop_duplicates()
Out[175]:
    interval_id       p_value      pivots
0             0  1.000000e+00  Jane Smith
1             0  1.116279e-08  Jane Smith
2             0  2.867501e-06  Jane Smith
6             1  1.000000e+00  Jane Smith
7             1  1.116279e-08  Jane Smith
8             1  2.867501e-06  Jane Smith
12            2  1.000000e+00  Jane Smith
13            2  1.116279e-08  Jane Smith
14            2  2.867501e-06  Jane Smith
36            0  1.000000e+00   Bob Smith
37            0  1.116279e-08   Bob Smith
38            0  2.867501e-06   Bob Smith
42            1  1.000000e+00   Bob Smith
43            1  1.116279e-08   Bob Smith
44            1  2.867501e-06   Bob Smith
48            2  1.000000e+00   Bob Smith
49            2  1.116279e-08   Bob Smith
50            2  2.867501e-06   Bob Smith

[18 rows x 3 columns]