getting specific info from openweathermap in python 2.7

Question

I am trying to create a python program (as a university exercise) that will get coordinates from the user and print certain messages to the user eg: if it rains at the certain region it will print "I am singing the rain"

import json,urllib2


while True:
    x=input("Give the longitude:")
    if x<=180 and x>=-180:
        x=str(x)
        break

while True:
    y=input("Give the latitude:")
    if y<=90 and y>=-90:
        y=str(y)
        break
url="http://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather?lat="+y+"&lon="+x+"&appid=01e7a487b0c262921260c09b84bdb456"
weatherbot=urllib2.urlopen(url)
weatherinfo=weatherbot.read()

So far I can get the info from Openweathermap,but if I try to get specific info like that:

currentweather=weatherinfo["weather"]["main"]

It gives me this error message:

TypeError:string indices must be integer, not str

Despite when I do:

print weatherinfo

it appears to be a dictionary.

Can someone explain to me what I am doing wrong?

PS:Don't suggest installing extra libraries in Python,since I am not 100% sure our professor will be using said libraries to check our code.

Answer 1

weatherinfo is a JSON-formatted string. In order to have a dictionary like access to it, you need to load it via json.load() :

import json

weatherinfo = json.load(weatherbot)
print(weatherinfo["weather"][0]["main"])  # prints "Clear"