How to convert JSON to a python dictionary:
JSON or Javascript object notation is a lightweight format for exchanging and storing data. Python provides json module for working with JSON contents. It provides a method called loads() which can be used to convert JSON data to a python dictionary.
In this post, we will learn how to use loads() to convert JSON data from a string and from a file to a python dictionary.
Python json.loads(s):
loads() method is called to convert a string, byte-array or bytes to a JSON. For using this method, we need to import json module and use it to parse data.
For example:
import json
json_data = '{"1": "Jan", "2": "Feb", "3": "March", "4": "April"}'
json_dict = json.loads(json_data)
print(json_dict)
print(type(json_dict))It will print:
{'1': 'Jan', '2': 'Feb', '3': 'March', '4': 'April'}
<class 'dict'>- json_data is a string holding a JSON string.
- The first print statement printed the dictionary created by converting the json_data to the dictionary json_dict.
- The second dictionary prints the type of the json_dict which is dict.
Loading data from a file:
We can also load the data from a JSON file and parse it to a dictionary. Create a file data.json with the below data:
{
"1": "Jan",
"2": "Feb",
"3": "March",
"4": "April"
}The below code will read the data and parse it to a dict :
import json
with open("data.json") as f:
json_dict = json.load(f)
print(json_dict)
print(type(json_dict))Here,
- We are opening the data.json file and loading the data using load().
It will print the below output:
{'1': 'Jan', '2': 'Feb', '3': 'March', '4': 'April'}
<class 'dict'>