Parsing JSON with python: blank fields

Question

I'm having problems while parsing a JSON with python, and now I'm stuck.
The problem is that the entities of my JSON are not always the same. The JSON is something like:

"entries":[
{
"summary": "here is the sunnary",
"extensions": {
   "coordinates":"coords",
   "address":"address",
   "name":"name"
   "telephone":"123123"
   "url":"www.blablablah"
},
}
]

I can move through the JSON, for example:

for entrie in entries:
  name =entrie['extensions']['name']
  tel=entrie['extensions']['telephone']

The problem comes because sometimes, the JSON does not have all the "fields", for example, the telephone field, sometimes is missing, so, the script fails with KeyError, because the key telephone is missing in this entry.
So, my question: how could I run this script, leaving a blank space where telephone is missing? I've tried with:

if entrie['extensions']['telephone']:
    tel=entrie['extensions']['telephone']

but I think is not ok.

Answer 1

Use dict.get instead of []:

entries['extensions'].get('telephone', '')

Or, simply:

entries['extensions'].get('telephone')

get will return the second argument (default, None) instead of raising a KeyError when the key is not found.