What’s the best way to parse a JSON response from the requests library?

I’m using the python requests module to send a RESTful GET to a server, for which I get a response in JSON. The JSON response is basically just a list of lists.

What’s the best way to coerce the response to a native Python object so I can either iterate or print it out using pprint?

Answers:

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Method 1

Since you’re using requests, you should use the response’s json method.

import requests

response = requests.get(...)
data = response.json()

It autodetects which decoder to use.

Method 2

You can use json.loads:

import json
import requests

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

This converts a given string into a dictionary which allows you to access your JSON data easily within your code.

Or you can use @Martijn’s helpful suggestion, and the higher voted answer, response.json().

Method 3

You can use the json response as dictionary directly:

import requests

res = requests.get('https://reqres.in/api/users?page=2')
print(f'Total users: {res.json().get("total")}')

or you can hold the json content as dictionary:

json_res = res.json()

and from this json_res dictionary variable, you can extract any value of your choice

json_res.get('total')
json_res["total"]

Attentions Because this is a dictionary, you should keep your eye on the key spelling and the case, i.e. ‘total’ is not the same as ‘Total’

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0