How to parse data in JSON format?

Question

My project is currently receiving a JSON message in python which I need to get bits of information out of. For the purposes of this, let's set it to some simple JSON in a string:

jsonStr = '{"one" : "1", "two" : "2", "three" : "3"}' 

So far I've been generating JSON requests using a list and then json.dumps, but to do the opposite of this I think I need to use json.loads. However I haven't had much luck with it. Could anyone provide me a snippet that would return "2" with the input of "two" in the above example?

Answer 1

Very simple:

import json data = json.loads('{"one" : "1", "two" : "2", "three" : "3"}') print data['two']  # Or `print(data['two'])` in Python 3 

Answer 2

Sometimes your json is not a string. For example if you are getting a json from a url like this:

j = urllib2.urlopen('http://site.com/data.json') 

you will need to use json.load, not json.loads:

j_obj = json.load(j) 

(it is easy to forget: the 's' is for 'string')