访问 JSON 嵌套 arrays 在 Python

Question

I'm new to Python and I'm trying to process something and having no luck finding the answer or if it's already been asked. I'm making a call to an API and receiving some data back as JSON. I'm stripping out certain bits that I don't need with the keys being stripped out and only the values remaining which wouldn't be a problem but I can't get into them as the keys I want to access are nested in an array.

I've been accessing the data and can get up to json.dumps(payload['output']['generic']) but I can't seem to find any information online as to how I can access these last values only.

Apologies in advance if this question already exists.

 { "output": { "generic": [ { "response_type": "text", "text": "hi" } ], "intents": [ { "intent": "CollectionDate", "confidence": 0.8478035449981689 } ], "entities": [ { "entity": "Payslip", "location": [ 19, 26 ], "value": "When is my collection date", "confidence": 1 } ] }, "context": { "global": { "system": { "turn_count": 10 } }, "skills": { "main skill": { "user_defined": { "DemoContext": "Hi," }: "system": {} } } } }

To clarify:

I want to access the "text", "intent" and "confidence"

at the moment I'm printing the value posted and then the responses for the sections I want like the below.

print(x)
print(json.dumps(payload['output']['generic']))
print(json.dumps(payload['output']['intents']))

Answer 1

Use following code to convert the json to a dict first:

json_data = json.loads(str(yourData))

After that, in your case, the outermost key is "output", and it is another dict, so just use json_data['output'] to access the content inside.

For other keys inside of the "output", like "generic", you can see it is an array with the [] brackets. use json_data['output'][index] first to get the content inside, then use the same method you access a dict to access the content inside of keys like this.

Answer 2

They key here is that the Traceback error indicates an issue with indexing a "List"

This is because a "List" type is a valid JSON type, and generic contains a list of length 1, with a dict inside!

>>> payload['output']['generic']['text']
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: list indices must be integers or slices, not str
>>> type(payload['output']['generic'])
<class 'list'>
>>> len(payload['output']['generic'])
1
>>> payload['output']['generic'][0]
{'response_type': 'text', 'text': 'hi'}
>>> type(payload['output']['generic'][0])
<class 'dict'>
>>> payload['output']['generic'][0]['text']
'hi'
>>>

So, given your expected input JSON format, you will need to know how to index in to pull each required data point.

There are a few packages, glom is one, that will help you deal with missing values from API generated JSON.