How to convert raw javascript object to python dictionary?

Question

When screen-scraping some website, I extract data from <script> tags.
The data I get is not in standard JSON format. I cannot use json.loads().

# from
js_obj = '{x:1, y:2, z:3}'

# to
py_obj = {'x':1, 'y':2, 'z':3}

Currently, I use regex to transform the raw data to JSON format.
But I feel pretty bad when I encounter complicated data structure.

Do you have some better solutions?

Answer 1

demjson.decode()

import demjson

# from
js_obj = '{x:1, y:2, z:3}'

# to
py_obj = demjson.decode(js_obj)

jsonnet.evaluate_snippet()

import json, _jsonnet

# from
js_obj = '{x:1, y:2, z:3}'

# to
py_obj = json.loads(_jsonnet.evaluate_snippet('snippet', js_obj))

ast.literal_eval()

import ast

# from
js_obj = "{'x':1, 'y':2, 'z':3}"

# to
py_obj = ast.literal_eval(js_obj)

Answer 2

I'm facing the same problem this afternoon, and I finally found a quite good solution. That is JSON5.

The syntax of JSON5 is more similar to native JavaScript, so it can help you parse non-standard JSON objects.

You might want to check pyjson5 out.

Answer 3

Use json5

import json5

js_obj = '{x:1, y:2, z:3}'

py_obj = json5.loads(js_obj)

print(py_obj)

# output
# {'x': 1, 'y': 2, 'z': 3}

Answer 4

This will likely not work everywhere, but as a start, here's a simple regex that should convert the keys into quoted strings so you can pass into json.loads. Or is this what you're already doing?

In[70] : quote_keys_regex = r'([\{\s,])(\w+)(:)'

In[71] : re.sub(quote_keys_regex, r'\1"\2"\3', js_obj)
Out[71]: '{"x":1, "y":2, "z":3}'

In[72] : js_obj_2 = '{x:1, y:2, z:{k:3,j:2}}'

Int[73]: re.sub(quote_keys_regex, r'\1"\2"\3', js_obj_2)
Out[73]: '{"x":1, "y":2, "z":{"k":3,"j":2}}'