如何获取urllib2以数组形式返回数据

Question

Not sure if this is even possible, but if so it would be awesome.

My code is:

url = "https://*myDomain*.zendesk.com/api/v2/organizations/*{id}*/tags.json"
req = urllib2.request(url)
password_manager = urllib2.HTTPPasswordMgrWithDefaultRealm()
password_manager.add_password(None, url, 'example@domain.com', 'password')
auth_manager = urllib2.HTTPBasicAuthHandler(password_manager)
opener = urllib2.build_opener(auth_manager)
urllib2.install_opener(opener)
response = urllib2.urlopen(req)
tagsA = response.read()
print tagsA

Now the data that is returned is:

{"tags":[]}

The API call itself returns the following

{
tags: []
}

However trying to access the list doesn't work as it seems to treat tagsA as a string. I would like it to treat it as a list so that I could check if 'tags' is empty.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!!

Answer 1

You need to load json string into python dictionary via json.loads() :

import json

...

tagsA = json.loads(response.read())
print tagsA['tags']

Or, pass response to json.load() (thanks to @JF Sebastian's comment):

tagsA = json.load(response)
print tagsA['tags']

Answer 2

You need to json.load (or json.loads ) the response body.

However, if you're going to do any kind of semi-complicated HTTP calls (authentication, cookies, etc.) in Python, you should really be using Kenneth Reitz's excellent Requests library ( http://python-requests.org/ ) instead of urllib calls. Your entire code would become:

import requests
response = requests.get(url, auth=("my_username", "my_password"))
tagsA = response.json()