Python and JSON Error - TypeError: string indices must be integers

Question

I'm receiving the error TypeError: string indices must be integers when parsing a JSON response. I don't see what I'm doing wrong, the response is a dictionary..

A sample of my code that gets the same error from a testable free REST API:

import requests

response = requests.get('http://services.groupkt.com/state/get/IND/all')

for states in response.json():
    print ('{} {}'.format(states['name'], states['capital']))

Answer 1

When you iterate over a dictionary, you iterate over its keys. The (only) top-level key for that dictionary is "RestResponse" and your code translates to: "RestResponse"["name"] . Since it's a string, Python is expecting integer indices (like "RestResponse"[3] for slicing).

If you investigate the structure of the resulting dictionary you'll see that the results you want are under response.json()["RestResponse"]["result"] :

for states in response.json()["RestResponse"]["result"]:
    print ('{} {}'.format(states['name'], states['capital']))

Out:

Andhra Pradesh Hyderabad, India
Arunachal Pradesh Itanagar
Assam Dispur
Bihar Patna
Chhattisgarh Raipur
...

Answer 2

Your response is not an array, but an object.
The for loop in your code is actually iterating over the keys in a dict (parsed version of the JSON object).

Answer 3

When you iterable over response.json() you are just iterating over the str RestResponse which is the first element in your dict.

So, you should change your code as follows:

for states in response.json()['RestResponse']['result']:
    print ('{} {}'.format(states['name'], states['capital']))

Then, your output will be:

Andhra Pradesh Hyderabad, India
Arunachal Pradesh Itanagar
Assam Dispur
Bihar Patna
Chhattisgarh Raipur
Goa Panaji
Gujarat Gandhinagar
Haryana Chandigarh
Himachal Pradesh Shimla
...

Answer 4

The results you want are under "RestResponse" => "result"

"RestResponse" : {
    "messages" : [...]
    "result" : [ {}, {}, {} ... ]
}

So to get the states you should get the values of the result array.

request = requests.get('http://services.groupkt.com/state/get/IND/all')
response = request.json()
states = response["RestResponse"]["result"]

Now you can do:

for state in states:
    print ('{} {}'.format(state['name'], state['capital']))

The Output should be as expected.