Parsing JSON using the Requests Python library

The Requests library can parse out JSON key:value pairs. It’s fairly simple so lets go through it.

Make the GET request

This does assume that Requests is already installed using pip install requests.

1. Import requests.
2. Put your URL into a variable. This just makes calling it more readable later on.
3. Set up the following Python dicts: payload and headers.

Example:

import requests

url = "https://api.github.com/repos/octocat/Hello-World"

payload = {}

headers = {
    "Accept": "application/json",
    "Content-Type": "application/json",
    # Not using an API key in this example due to a public API endpoint.
    #"Authorization": f"{API_KEY}"
}

Note: If the API you’re trying to talk to requires an API key (most do) then use "Authorization": "API_KEY".

Note 2: NEVER put the actual API key in code, call it from an environment variable or other secure method.

Call the API

1. Next we’ll make a new variable and store the returned value of requets.get() passing in the url, headers, and payload variables we created earlier.
2. We’ll put this response into a new variable as JSON.
3. We can print the response to get a blob of JSON shown in example 2 of this section.

Example 1:

# 1
response = requests.get(url, headers=headers, data=payload)

# 2
response_data = response.json()

# 3
print(response_data)

Example 2 (truncated JSON):

{'id': 1296269, 'node_id': 'MDEwOlJlcG9zaXRvcnkxMjk2MjY5', 'name': 'Hello-World'},

Parsing the JSON

This part is fairly simple but can be more complex as the JSON becomes more complex. This is a very straight forward example.

We’ll be parsing the JSON from the URL (and in Example 2 above) to get the name of a repo.

1. Create a new variable, maybe named after the JSON key we’re getting the value for. Use .get("") on the response_data variable and pass in the key for the value that you want. Remember, this is looking for a key:value pair.
2. Print the value.

This outputs the name of the repo Hello-World. We put the output in an f-string just to fancy it up.

Example:

# 1
repo_name = response_data.get("name")

#2
print(f"Repo name: {repo_name}")

# Output: Repo name: Hello-World

Full code example

import requests

def main():

    url = "https://api.github.com/repos/octocat/Hello-World"

    payload = {}

    headers = {
            "Accept": "application/json",
            "Content-Type": "application/json",

            # Not using an API key in this example due to a public API endpoint.
            #"Authorization": f"{API_KEY}"
    }

    response = requests.get(url, headers=headers, data=payload)

    response_data = response.json()

    repo_name = response_data.get("name")

    print(f"Repo name: {repo_name}")


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()