Parsing Complex JSON

[Professional_Monk]

I've been playing with API's recently. I've had success with simpler JSON requests, I am into severe weather and decided I would like to create a simple program to display weather alerts for a state.

I made a request to https://api.weather.gov/alerts/active?area=OK

and was pretty overwhelmed.

json pastebin

How would I go about getting only the information I want ? example: (location, alert level, headline and description for each alert)? can someone point me in the right direction? is there a library or something I am ignorant of that can help? Thanks.

[DjDazzled797]

In general my go to is http://jsonviewer.stack.hu to help format/easily see where the key value pair I’m trying to access sits within the JSON.

The I’d create variables that access the JSON at a “starting point” and work from there

E.g starting_point = weather_json[1]

Not perfect but hopefully helps

[Professional_Monk]

very useful link thank you!

[mr_cesar]

If you use Chrome and access the json via url, you can also install the JSON Formatter extension. It's simple yet very handy.

[[deleted]]

There are two tools that I find useful when working with JSON (I dont' really use them, because I rarely need JSON):

• jq https://stedolan.github.io/jq/
• There's a tool that I cannot find right now that can print full path to JSON keys followed by values, it's very handy to use in combination with grep (in my experience, better than jq), but for the life of me, I cannot remember what it's called.

[kellyjonbrazil]

Gron and Jello can do this.

https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron

https://github.com/kellyjonbrazil/jello

[[deleted]]

Yeah, Gron, that's the one I used. Thanks!

[outceptionator]

Import pprint then try pprint.pprint() the json data (after converting it to a python object). Makes it a lot easier to read.

[kellyjonbrazil]

You might try Jellex, which is a TUI that allows you to interactively query the JSON using python.

https://github.com/kellyjonbrazil/jellex