Download REST API JSON response to a CSV file

Question

I'm incredibly new to Python/coding so I do apologise if this is a simple question.

I'm trying to download a REST API response to a CSV file

import requests
import json
import csv
from pprint import pprint
r = requests.get('https://finnhub.io/api/v1/stock/executive?symbol=AAPL&token=APIKEYHERE')
f = open ('output.csv', 'w')
writer = csv.writer(f)
for line in r.iter_lines():
    writer.writerow(line.decode('utf-8').split(','))
exit()

The problem is my response is this:

CSV File

{"executive":[{"age":68 "name":"Arthur D. Levinson" "since":2011 "title":"Independent Chairman of the Board"} {"age":58 "name":"Timothy D. Cook" "since":2011 "title":"Chief Executive Officer Director"} {"age":55 "name":"Luca Maestri" "since":2014 "title":"Chief Financial Officer Senior Vice President"} {"age":55 "name":"Jeffrey E. Williams" "since":2018 "title":"Chief Operating Officer"} {"age":53 "name":"Katherine L. Adams" "since":2017 "title":"Senior Vice President General Counsel Secretary"} {"age":58 "name":"Philip W. Schiller" "since":2002 "title":"Senior Vice President - Worldwide Marketing"} {"age":55 "name":"Eddy Cue" "since":2011 "title":"Senior Vice President - Internet Software and Services"} {"age":48 "name":"Craig Federighi" "since":2012 "title":"Senior Vice President - Software Engineering"} {"age":"" "name":"John Giannandrea" "since":2018 "title":"Senior Vice President - Machine Learning and AI Strategy"} {"age":"" "name":"Deirdre O'Brien" "since":2019 "title":"Senior V ice President - Retail + People"} {"age":55 "name":"Daniel J. Riccio" "since":2012 "title":"Senior Vice President - Hardware Engineering"} {"age":53 "name":"Johny Srouji" "since":2015 "title":"Senior Vice President - Hardware Technologies"} {"age":"" "name":"Jonathan P. Ive" "since":"" "title":"Chief Design Officer"} {"age":70 "name":"James A. Bell" "since":2015 "title":"Independent Director"} {"age":70 "name":"Albert A. Gore" "since":2003 "title":"Independent Director"} {"age":59 "name":"Andrea Jung" "since":2008 "title":"Independent Director"} {"age":70 "name":"Ronald D. Sugar" "since":2010 "title":"Independent Director"} {"age":57 "name":"Sue Wagner" "since":2014 "title":"Independent Director"}] "symbol":"AAPL"}

How do I get it so I can define the header row values and make sure the values alligned to each header as they should (ie: age values all under the age header, name values all under the name header etc)

This is what I would like it to be like :

What I would like it to be

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

You should use the DictWriter of csv module for this purpose. here is the example from python documentation DictWriter

import requests
import json
import csv
from pprint import pprint

r = requests.get('https://finnhub.io/api/v1/stock/executive?symbol=AAPL&token=APIKEYHERE')

with open('output.csv', 'w') as csvfile:
    fieldnames = ['name', 'age', 'title', 'since']
    writer = csv.DictWriter(csvfile, fieldnames=fieldnames)
    writer.writeheader()
    recs = r.json().get('executive')
    for rec in recs:
        writer.writerow(rec)
exit()