json-practice

Get practice working with JSON:

• jq
• Python3
• data/
• jsonlint
• jqplay

Reading and Fetching JSON

Reading JSON from a file

In bash you can read a file using cat and simply pass the output to jq with a | pipe like this:

cat data/simple.list.json | jq -r

In Python you can read a file into a variable, which can then be treated like a data object:

import json

# Open the JSON file
with open('data/schacon.repos.json', 'r') as file:
    data = json.load(file)

Fetching JSON from a remote source

Some curl examples for fetching JSON from a remote data source then passed to jq:

curl https://api.github.com/users/schacon/repos | jq -r
curl https://api.github.com/repos/nmagee/ds2002-course/branches | jq -r

In Python, either requests or urllib3 can GET remote data to populate a variable:

import requests

url = "https://api.github.com/users/schacon/repos"
response = requests.get(url)

data = response.json()

1. Compare with XML

{"menu": {
  "id": "file",
  "value": "File",
  "popup": {
    "menuitem": [
      {"value": "New", "onclick": "CreateNewDoc()"},
      {"value": "Open", "onclick": "OpenDoc()"},
      {"value": "Close", "onclick": "CloseDoc()"}
    ]
  }
}}

The same text expressed as XML:

<menu id="file" value="File">
  <popup>
    <menuitem value="New" onclick="CreateNewDoc()" />
    <menuitem value="Open" onclick="OpenDoc()" />
    <menuitem value="Close" onclick="CloseDoc()" />
  </popup>
</menu>

Drawn from https://json.org/example.html

2. Work with jq

Review the contents of jq/README.md and practice using the CLI to parse JSON.

3. Work with Python

Review the contents of python/README.md and practice using Python to parse JSON.