Problem: How to Parse a JSON object as a Python One-Liner?
Example: Say, you have pulled a JSON object from a server using the curl command:
curl -s http://example.com | python -mjson.tool { "continent_code": "EU", "country": "Netherlands", "country_code": "NL", ... "timezone": "Europe/Amsterdam" }
How to parse the resulting JSON object and extract, say, the value "Netherlands"
associated to the "country"
key?
Solution: The following one-liner accomplishes this:
curl -s http://example.com | python -c 'import sys, json; print(json.load(sys.stdin)["country"])'
The command consists of multiple parts. Let’s go over them in a step-by-step manner:
curl -s http://example.com
— extract the JSON file from the serverhttp://example.com
. The-s
flag stands for “silent” and it simply surpresses unnecessary information printed to the standard output.curl ... | ...
— the pipe operator|
redirects the output of one program and use it as input to another program. In our example, it takes the JSON object and writes it to the standard input of the Python program described next.python -c '...'
— Runs the Python program enclosed in the single quote environment.import sys, json;
— imports the modulessys
andjson
. The trailing semicolon indicates that this expression is ready and the next expression (what you would call a line in a multi-line Python script) is following.print(json.load(sys.stdin)["country"])
— loads the JSON object from the standard input to which the JSON object was piped in step 2. Then, the dictionary key"country"
is used to access the resulting value"Netherlands"
. The result is printed to the standard output.
Thus, the result is the string "Netherlands"
in our example JSON file.
An alternative to this method is the jq library. You can find a full tutorial on this excellent website.
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