Python: How to convert a dictionary of lists to a JSON object?

Question

I am new to the 'json' library thingy and having trouble converting a dictionary of lists to a JSON object, below are the dictionary I got:

import json

data = {

     'title' : ['Seven days', 'Not Today', 'Bad Moms'],
     'date'  : ['July 17', 'Aug 18', 'Jan 19']

}

json_data = json.dumps(data)

print(json_data)

Here was the result I got:

{"title" : ['Seven days', 'Not Today', 'Bad Moms'], "date" : ['July 17', 'Aug 18', 'Jan 19']}

How to get it structured it in this way:

{"title" : "Seven days","date" : "July 17"}, {"title" : "Not Today","date" : "Aug 18"}, {"title" : "Bad Mom","date" : "Jan 19"}

Thank you.

Answer 1

You can convert your data like this:

d = [{'title': t, 'date': d} for t, d in zip(data['title'], data['date'])]
#[{'title': 'Seven days', 'date': 'July 17'}, 
# {'title': 'Not Today', 'date': 'Aug 18'}, 
# {'title': 'Bad Moms', 'date': 'Jan 19'}]

Dumping this to json will result in some string like:

'[{"title": "Seven days", "date": "July 17"}, {"title": "Not Today", "date": "Aug 18"}, {"title": "Bad Moms", "date": "Jan 19"}]'

If you want your json to have a guaranteed order with regard to the keys in each object, you can use:

from collections import OrderedDict
d = [OrderedDict([('title', t), ('date', d)]) for t, d in zip(data['title'], data['date'])]

Answer 2

Restructure data first:

import json
data = {

 'title' : ['Seven days', 'Not Today', 'Bad Moms'],
 'date'  : ['July 17', 'Aug 18', 'Jan 19']

}
new_data = [{"title":i, "date":b} for i, b in zip(data["title"], data["date"])]
final_data = json.dumps(new_data)

Output:

'[{"date": "July 17", "title": "Seven days"}, {"date": "Aug 18", "title": "Not Today"}, {"date": "Jan 19", "title": "Bad Moms"}]'

A more robust solution:

new_data = [dict(zip(data.keys(), i)) for i in zip(*data.values())]

Note that the solution above is best used in Python2, where the .keys() and .values() are ordered.

Answer 3

You can do this if you wanted to do long version, you just have to put the two fields of data in two lists first.

import json

data = {

     'title' : ['Seven days', 'Not Today', 'Bad Moms'],
     'date'  : ['July 17', 'Aug 18', 'Jan 19']

}

titles = data['title']
dates = data['date']

lst = list()

for i in range(len(titles)):
    a = dict()
    a["title"] = titles[i]
    a["date"] = dates[i]
    lst.append(a)

print json.dumps(lst)

Output will look like:

[{"date": "July 17", "title": "Seven days"}, {"date": "Aug 18", "title": "Not Today"}, {"date": "Jan 19", "title": "Bad Moms"}]