How To Use JSON in Python

09/08/2021

Contents

In this article, you will learn how to use JSON in Python.

Using JSON in Python

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data interchange format that is easy for humans to read and write and easy for machines to parse and generate. In Python, you can use the json module to work with JSON data.

Here’s a quick guide to using JSON in Python:

Parsing JSON

You can parse JSON data using the json.loads() method, which takes a string as an argument and returns a Python object:

import json

json_string = '{"name": "John", "age": 30, "city": "New York"}'

python_object = json.loads(json_string)

print(python_object)
# Output: {'name': 'John', 'age': 30, 'city': 'New York'}

Encoding JSON

You can convert a Python object to a JSON string using the json.dumps() method:

import json

python_object = {
  "name": "John",
  "age": 30,
  "city": "New York"
}

json_string = json.dumps(python_object)

print(json_string)
# Output: '{"name": "John", "age": 30, "city": "New York"}'

You can also specify additional parameters to control the format of the output JSON string:

import json

python_object = {
  "name": "John",
  "age": 30,
  "city": "New York"
}

json_string = json.dumps(python_object, indent=4, sort_keys=True)

print(json_string)
# Output:
# {
#     "age": 30,
#     "city": "New York",
#     "name": "John"
# }

Reading and Writing JSON from/to a file

You can also read and write JSON data from and to a file, respectively, using the json.load() and json.dump() methods.

Here’s an example of reading JSON from a file:

import json

with open('data.json', 'r') as file:
    python_object = json.load(file)

print(python_object)
# Output: {'name': 'John', 'age': 30, 'city': 'New York'}

And here’s an example of writing JSON to a file:

import json

python_object = {
  "name": "John",
  "age": 30,
  "city": "New York"
}

with open('data.json', 'w') as file:
    json.dump(python_object, file)
#Python