Convert JSON multi-dimensional array into single-dimensional array in Python

Question

I have a JSON file that goes along the lines of:

{
    "pathID": 1,
    "preText": "Please select based on the options.",
    "selection": "",
    "options": 
        {
            "pathID": 2,
            "preText": "This is Option 1",
            "selection": ""
        }
}

Which I would like to convert to 1-dimensional, which would look similar to:

{
    "pathID": 1,
    "preText": "Please select based on the options.",
    "selection": ""
},
{
    "pathID": 2,
    "preText": "This is Option 1",
    "selection": ""
}

How would I go about this in Python? I've tried stuff like np.asarray and using chain maps.

I'm very new to Python and working with JSON files (both my first day).

Answer 1

Assuming here that you want your output dictionaries to be stored in a list, you could do:

data_in = {
    "pathID": 1,
    "preText": "Please select based on the options.",
    "selection": "",
    "options": 
        {
            "pathID": 2,
            "preText": "This is Option 1",
            "selection": ""
        }
}

# start with a 1-element list which just contains a copy of the input 
data_out = [data_in.copy()]

# but go through the items of the dictionary, and if any values are themselves
# dictionaries then remove them from this dictionary, and add them to the output 
# list
for k, v in data_in.items():
    if isinstance(v, dict):
        del data_out[0][k]
        data_out.append(v)

print(data_out)

This gives essentially this, although pretty-printed here for readability:

[
    {
        'pathID': 1,
        'preText': 'Please select based on the options.',
        'selection': ''
    },
    {
        'pathID': 2,
        'preText': 'This is Option 1',
        'selection': ''
    }
]

(In a JSON dump this would use double-quotes but otherwise look the same.)

Answer 2

You could give the python module FlatDict a try.

flatdict is a Python module for interacting with nested dicts as a single level dict with delimited keys. flatdict supports Python 3.5+.

This might be better than creating your custom solution