Parse a JSON String from Facebook Graph API using Python

Question

I'm trying to compile all of my facebook friends user ids, but the output is difficult for me to work with. How can I simplify? It looks like this currently:

{
    u'friends': {
        u'paging': {
            u'next': u'https://graph.facebook.com/556702392/friends?access_token=-MYACCESSTOKEN-&limit=5000&offset=5000&__after_id=100005821213415'
        }, 
        u'data': [
            {u'name': u'Ian Fung', u'id': u'419972'}, 
            {u'name': u'Jason Turer', u'id': u'420694'},
            ...
        ]
   }
   ...
}

This is what I've been able to come up with:

try:
    resp = urllib2.urlopen(url)
    contents = resp.read()
except urllib2.HTTPError, error:
    contents = error.read()

json_encoded = json.loads(contents)
print json_encoded["data"]["id"]

How can I store just the IDs?

Answer 1

It's not entirely clear what data you want, but this list comprehension extracts id from friends data :

>>> json_data = {u'friends': {u'paging': {u'next': u'https://graph.facebook.com/556702392/friends?access_token=-MYACCESSTOKEN-&limit=5000&offset=5000&__after_id=100005821213415'}, u'data': [{u'name': u'Ian Fung', u'id': u'419972'}, {u'name': u'Jason Turer', u'id': u'420694'}]}}
>>> [x['id'] for x in json_data['friends']['data']]
[u'419972', u'420694']

Answer 2

Hope this helps you(and your given data is clumsy and not clear)

import json
from pprint import pprint

json_data=open('json_data')
decoded_data = json.load(json_data)
pprint(decoded_data)
json_data.close()

you can get the json values like this

decoded_data["friends"]["pagind"]["next"]
decoded_data["data"]["name"]
decoded_data["value"]