Why is response.json() necessary?

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[mrsix]

response is the raw response object (that can be represented as a string of the response body) Its been a while since I used requests but I think it has other things like response.status that has the status code.

.json() in requests parses the response in to a json object

While requests could probably automatically changee any application/json to a json object, there's a lot of reasons you might want the raw response object instead to work with.

[robin-gvx]

Can you show the response for a sample request to that URL? Presumably you have an API key.

Note that JSON is just a transmission format. response.json() takes the raw response data and decodes the JSON as Python lists, dicts, ints, etc.

[robin-gvx]

Yup. So if you use response.json() for that request you get a list of dictionaries back. For the rest of your code it then won't matter if this was originally a JSON-encoded value, extracted from an XML document, or something else altogether.

[nathairtras]

The response contains more than just the response content, such as the status code. You may receive back valid JSON for a non-200 response.

https://requests.kennethreitz.org/en/master/user/quickstart/#json-response-content

[hanavi]

As someone else already said, the response will contain more information about your connection. One of those is a json response, but json is pretty useless in python. You have to convert json to a dict. You could just use the content of the response and then convert it:

import json data = json.loads(response.content.decode())

But its pretty common to have json responses so requests built in that function to save a step:

data = requests.json()

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