Convert Javascript array to python list?

Question

I want to make google trasnlate script. I am making a request to translate.google.com and google return an array but the array contains undefined items.You can imagine response comes as string. I can remove commas if there is more than one consecutive with regex etc. but I am looking best solution :)

How can I convert this javascript array to python list?

["a","b",,,"e"]

My script : http://ideone.com/jhjZe

Answer 1

JavaScript part - encoding

In Javascript you do:

var arr = ["a","b",,,"e"];
var json_string = JSON.stringify(arr);

then you somehow pass json_string (now equal to "["a","b",null,null,"e"]" string) from JavaScript to Python.

Python part - decoding

Then, on Python side do:

json_string = '["a","b",null,null,"e"]'  # passed from JavaScript

try:
    import simplejson as json
except (ImportError,):
    import json

result = json.loads(json_string)

As a result you get [u'a', u'b', None, None, u'e'] in Python.

More links

See below:

• demo of JavaScript part,
• Documentation on JSON.stringify() at Mozilla Developer Network,
• demo of Python part,

Dependencies

The above solutions require:

• JSON.stringify() in JavaScript, which is in all mobile browsers, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari and in IE since version 8.0 (more detailed list of compatible browsers is here),
• json Python library (the above code will use simplejson optionally, if available, but is not required), which comes in standard library,

So, in short there are no external dependencies.